Pronunciation problems in english pdf

A B U Taher. A short summary of this paper. English pronunciation problems of Bengali speaking learners: A case study. Due to the different phonetic patterns of Bangla and English languages, speakers of Bangla language are supposed to face some difficulties in pronouncing specific phonemes of English.

This article coins some problems concerning the pronunciation of English of Bengali speaking learners. Bengali is the national recommendations that might be useful to overcome some of the and official language of Bangladesh and one of the official problems. It is also spoken in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. Due to the different phonetic patterns of Bangla and Objectives of the study English languages, speakers of Bangla languages are supposed to This study has been designed to explore the following objectives face some difficulties in pronouncing English Phonemes.

It English pronunciation. As we have grown up to be adults, the is one of the essential skills of the language. In the field of habits of our first language become too strong in us, and we teaching English as a foreign language EFL or second language, cannot acquire a second language as quickly. Classroom activities should be based and analyzing two sounds systems by comparing English and according to the learner's needs.

For instance, some students may Bangla pronunciations, and then provides some practical prefer to improve their vocabulary skills or strengthen their suggestions for teaching and learning it. Regardless of current orientation or what skill the students may need to improve, Purpose of the Study perhaps we say that teaching pronunciation considerers as an The purpose of the study is to identify the problems faced by essential task in an ESL class where survival class is very vital to Bengali students in speaking English.

It is also focused on the the students. It will even attempt to shed light speakers notice during a conversation. These are dealt with by prosthesis or epenthesis of 1- People usually do not understand what one is saying a glottal stop or a vowel. She also states, unlike English, Pronunciation and listening comprehension are interconnected by Bengali rhythm is based on arranging long and short syllables, the unified system in which individual sounds are systematically not stressed and unstressed ones.

Thus, there is more of a spelling related together. Gilbert, Factors Influencing Pronunciations 2. Native Language There are several factors that are influencing the pronunciation of If the sound patterns of the native language are similar to L2, Bengali learners.

That is, the first language interference by pronunciation becomes easier. The L1-L2 distance makes interference of mother language besides it Brown [3] pronunciation difficult proportionately. From this expect we find presents the following list of factors that affect pronunciation of a lot of variation between English and Bangla sound patterns. Children seem to pick phonetics, stress and intonation problems and so on. Meanwhile, Pronunciation is considered to be the pronunciation of the target language and is a significant factor the most challenging part of a speech for adult learners to master.

So-called interference from the Some researchers argue that, after puberty, lateralization the first language is likely to cause errors in aspiration, stress, and assigning of linguistic functions to the different brain intonation in the target language. In tracing out difficulties faced by Bengali speakers of English, 4. It is not common to find that quite to sound patterns, stress, and rhythm and intonation system of a few students resist coordination with teachers in phonetic English.

Haque et al. Thus the teacher has to have sufficient knowledge of that a Bengali vowel is not conditioned by length. Innate phonetic ability syllables. All these are not usually observed by a Bengali speaker.

Innate can be used figuratively for something that comes from the Along with the same context, Mujaffar [19] observes that mind rather than from external sources. Because of mother tongue influence or phoneme. Stress and intonation factor in the target language In another study, Hoque [8] has brought out some Stress and intonation are two essential aspects of pronunciation. They also commonly syllable in each word to stress others.

It happens, as the example, 'abstract, conduct, contract, contrast, import, incline, sound is absent in Chittagonian variety. Some other students insult, perfect, present, produce, rebel, etc. So, differences are distinguishable in specific phonemes in English on which there is a strong influence the above discussion. Providing consonant sounds 3. The 5. Bengali speakers tend to sound in different positions and asked to say the following words substitute some un-aspirated English consonants with loudly to investigate the pronunciation problems of these letters aspirated sounds.

Some labio-dental fricatives become bilabial plosive or 1. They also observe Bengali speakers tend omniscient, beneficent; to substitute some un-aspirated English consonants with aspirated 7. Students could not recognize to fit the first language. Their first language is affected 5. This cluster was tones.

However, they have observed it is L1 interference, which causes Along the same vein, Uddin and Manjur have studied the maximum problems for producing correct English by the Chinese influence of Bangla dialects on English pronunciation and they speakers, though other factors are also more or less responsible.

Noakhali, The same elements are also relevant to the English pronunciation Sylhet, Asam, and Chittagong the pronunciation of the same of Bengali learners. In these particular four regions, English pronunciation is Methodology identical with their own dialect. The presentation of 30 students also been observed by the If other zones are considered, any rigid isogloss cannot be set researchers. A mixed-method methodology has been adopted by rather those zones can be tagged with dialect continuum.

It has been found that the people of other regions except for Noakhali; Chittagong, Sylhet, and Asam are almost the same in Data collection their English accent. Some students have been asked to read a passage containing with the ideas of the same issues of L2 learners in producing difficult words that are problematic for pronunciation.

Our study resembles 2. In the open-ended questions, the teacher was given the scope English pronunciation problems in the study of Zhang and Yin to incorporate their valuable suggestions regarding the [28] but goes further in many other respects. From the development of the pronunciation of the learners. English pronunciation is essential for Bengali students. In have no idea about modern digital materials.

They believe classroom. They also mentioned that it helps students to practice transcription orally. They mentioned that there is no 2. Every educational institution should strictly follow the particular chapter for practicing pronunciation. Material and teacher training is a fact to teach English Results of the Students Questionnaire pronunciation. They are strongly has been summarized in table then and explained agreed on it.

They are not fully aware of English phonetics and on teaching English pronunciation. Even most of the students had a curiosity about learning English sound. Finally, teachers should be more efficient in pronunciation, and 3. They understand the lack of pronunciation and want to thus they will be able to correct their student's English accent.

The mother tongue interference is natural and can be mitigated 4. They believe that the Digital Dictionary can help them to by only appropriately treating them in the teaching process, improve their English pronunciation. Some researchers 5.

Some other researchers only brought 6. They have hesitation and shyness in learning English vowels out the factors behind the wrong pronunciation without any and sounds as it is not available in their mother tongue. But no researcher has worked to find out both problematic 7. They have the demand for English language Labs where they phonemes and elements behind incorrect pronunciation. According to Corder , it is inevitable that the syllabus 8.

They have little idea about the difference between English has to contain the linguistic items the learner lacks and wants in and Bangla sound. Unlike the Bengali language, the not essential to get good marks in the exam. English language has strong and weak forms, such as articles, Their syllabus is not entirely focused on learning better pronouns, auxiliaries, prepositions, etc which are usually pronunciation. We interviewed more than 40 Engineering University students on pronunciation, and from their curiosity, they also asked many References questions.

All those are mentioned serially in the below: 1. Abercrombie, David. Hence, in most language classrooms, attention is paid foremost to the intelligibility and the ability of students to express themselves in a way that is intelligible to their classmates and the class teacher rather than how much they resemble native speakers.

The standards document, which acts as a guide for English language teachers in Malaysian public schools, does not explicitly instruct teachers to aim for pupils achieving native-like pronunciation. English Language Teaching ELT professionals should stress that speaking is distinctive from pronunciation and they are not interchangeably used.

In a study of companies from 14 different sectors, it was found that English pronunciation skill was among the most assessed Pronunciation skills also featured heavily in English pronunciation skills are vital even in technical fields and lack of it impacts graduate employability.

Similarly, graduates intending to find work in multinational companies inside or even outside Malaysia might consider taking a more serious look into their English pronunciation.

In Yong et al. Additionally, Nair et al. The observation that pronunciation learning and teaching receive little focus is not exclusive in Malaysia.

Where oral communication skills are included, teacher education courses have typically highlighted components of grammar and vocabulary, or fluency in speaking and listening skills Celce-Murcia et al.

Burns is not alone in her view as a similar finding was found by Deng et al. Not only was pronunciation-related research under-represented in the literature, but only five articles out of 2, were relevant for teachers interested in the teaching of pronunciation. In order to draw attention to the importance of pronunciation, it is important that English language instructors use the right methods and utilize the right tools to bring attention to pronunciation practices in the language classroom.

Some proponents believe that difficulties in learning English pronunciation arise due to the differences between the target language and the mother tongue of the language learners.

This field of research dwells into studying how the target language deviates from the mother tongue in order to predict the difficulties that language learners may face.

In Malaysia, the national language — Malay language - is used as the main medium of instruction in national schools. English is taught as a compulsory second language subject in all Malaysian schools. From a contrastive analysis point of view, although English shares the same alphabet system as Malay, the pronunciation of these alphabets and phonemes are different. It is therefore, anticipated that students are likely to be confused and make pronunciation errors when learning to pronounce English sounds and words.

On the positive side, insights from contrastive analysis will be able to not only explain the possible reasons behind pronunciation errors of Malaysian students, but will also allow language instructors to make use of this realization to inform them in their classroom pedagogy. Knowing which sounds are likely to be difficult for the students, language instructors will then be able to decide on how much time and which sounds should they focus on when teaching English pronunciation in the Malaysian classroom.

Conducted in a tertiary setting, two research instruments were employed and the processes involved are detailed in the sub-sections below.

Twelve low oral proficiency students were identified and invited by their English course instructor to participate in the study. Before enrolment into universities, students are required to sit for MUET. Band 1 being the lowest extremely limited user of English and Band 6 is the highest very good user of English.

All twelve participants in this study are those who scored Band 2 and below and are regarded as students with low proficiency in English. The first was a questionnaire designed to collect background information of the participants. This questionnaire provided basic background data of the participants including age, sex, nationality, language spoken at home and MUET band score.

The second instrument was a reading aloud test based on a reading text entitled The North Wind and the Sun. The reading text has been chosen as the instrument in the research because it has been widely used for phonetic research Deterding, According to Deterding , The North Wind and the Sun is an exceptional resource in phonetic research as it is a much more compact text which allows pronunciation comparisons. Linguists have been invited to contribute phonetic versions in different languages and dialects of The North Wind and the Sun by the International Phonetic Association since , and its transcriptions for many accents of English have also been provided Deterding, It began with the preliminary phase of research instruments development and the identification of a reading aloud text for the reading test.

It then moved on to the next phase, which was data collection. Finally, data analysis and presentation followed. The research procedures are presented in Figure 1. Research procedures At the beginning of data collection, respondents were asked to fill in the questionnaire. Once they have completed the questionnaire, the respondents proceeded with the individual reading aloud test. In the reading aloud test, students were required to read aloud twice. All the reading aloud tests were audio recorded on digital recording devices.

When error analysis was performed, each student recording was listened to and analyzed by two raters to confirm the mispronounced sounds. Once the mispronounced sounds were confirmed, they were transcribed phonetically and tabulated.

The analyzed data are quantified to illustrate the pronunciation errors and their frequencies. Error analysis EA is a process of identifying and recording the errors made by a learner. He further highlighted that EA provides the much needed data in the planning of pedagogical strategies in the language classrooms.

In language learning, error analysis enables language instructors to make informed decision about the problems and weaknesses of their students. Upon recognizing these problems, the language instructor should then be able to pay attention to what are the problematic areas to be tackled and work towards improving these aspects. The results of the analysis will later be used in the second phase of this study to design a pronunciation teaching module specifically for the participants.

To be truly effective, classroom pedagogy and teaching decisions should be guided by the needs of the students. Out of the twelve participants, three were males while nine were females. The participants ranged from the age of 19 — 24 years old. Except for one Chinese student who spoke Cantonese and Hokkien at home, all the other participants were native speakers of Malay. Table 1 presents the number of errors made in the reading aloud test.

The results supported Yong et al. Table 1. Number of pronunciation errors made in the Reading Aloud Test. Table 2 depicts examples of words from the reading aloud text which were mispronounced by the students. Table 2. Examples of mispronounced words. Table 3. Pronunciation errors made in the -ed form. These are sounds that are not found in Malay. Hence, the participants made these mistakes as these sounds were unfamiliar, and they therefore faced problems when they were asked to pronounce these unfamiliar sounds.

From this finding, language instructors should then be aware of the need to focus their attention on the teaching of these sounds to English learners. This may seem peculiar as Malay has all three plosive consonants and yet they are listed as problematic for the participants. Nevertheless, one possible reason as to what makes these sounds problematic for the students may be that in Malay, these plosive consonants usually appear in the beginning and middle of a word, either preceded or followed by a vowel.

In English, consonant clusters where two or more consonants are placed together with no vowels in between are common. Thus, this unfamiliar formation of consonant clusters creates confusion for the participants when they attempted to pronounce those sounds. In addition, it can also be observed from the data collected that the participants have problems with deciding whether to use long and short pure vowel sounds.

These six vowel sounds are short. In some dialects or instances, when long sounds are used in Malay, they are mainly used purposely to put stress on the word and carry paralinguistic meaning.

As the study embarked to identify the commonly mispronounced sounds by low oral proficiency Malaysian students, the issue of intelligibility is recognized.

Moreover, Jenkins pointed out that phonological problems often are reasons for unsuccessful communications. The subsequent discussion of this study will focus on pronunciation errors that may affect intelligibility; and in other words, they may affect the actual meaning of the words.

The mispronunciation of a word could make it sound like another word altogether, or lead to a non-recognizable word. From the findings, it is identified that there were 12 mispronounced words made by students which may affect intelligibility see Table 4. Pronunciation errors that may affect intelligibility. Words Pronounced Wrongly in No. Job-seekers are frequently misjudged when they fail to convince prospective employers of their capabilities due to poor pronunciation and not having the language to convey themselves well.

As the sample size is small, a bigger sample size would possibly generate a wider range of mispronounced words and sounds. Nevertheless, subsequent plans to include a bigger sample size are already underway to further improve and strengthen the findings of this study. Besides that, errors involving the -ed form were quite difficult to identify as some sounds were pronounced not quite correctly but were not entirely incorrect either. This was mitigated through the use of two raters for the phonological transcriptions of the pronunciation errors.

As much as it is important to know why students have pronunciation problems, it is of equal if not more important that ways on how these pronunciation problems can be corrected is dwelt into. In addition, special programs should also be introduced and implemented to help students improve their pronunciation.