In Hong Kong, primary-school aged students have very serious pronunciation problems. Teachers only find out and rectify students’ pronunciation errors. They even ask them to repeat the correct sounds. However, when students read new words with previously learnt phonemes, they mispronounce again. Both teachers and students are frustrated in the journey of teaching and learning English pronunciation. Indeed, they hold keys to solve the problems.
In this small-scale empirical investigation, learners’ pronunciation problems in vowels, consonant digraphs and initial consonant clusters will be assessed and critically evaluated. Five main reasons behind those problems will be discussed in depth as it is essential for teachers to develop effective
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Students constantly confused the target consonant pairs (/f, θ/ and /d, ð/) and the production of specific pronunciation errors are strongly supported by the renowned research results done in HK in the past (Chan & Li, 2000; Kenworthy, 1987). The reason for such confusion is that ‘th’ sounds do not exist in Cantonese phonological system. As mentioned by Chan (2001), English dental fricatives /θ/ and /ð/ sounds are very rare in the world’s languages. Therefore, these sounds are regarded as universal difficulty. As a result, Hong Kong students find great production difficulties when reading words with ‘th’ sounds. They may tend to use /f/ to replace /θ/ sounds in the words like ‘teeth’ and ‘birth’; use /d/ to replace / ð / sounds in words such as ‘the’, ‘that’ and …show more content…
It is because Cantonese has no consonant clusters. Therefore, epenthesis and deletion are common strategies used to simplify word-initial consonant clusters. According to Chan and Li (2000), deletion is frequently found in both word-initial and word-final positions. Hong Kong students commonly delete /r/ when it follows a plosive. It is also a common scene that students simply omit /r/ sounds in initial consonant clusters /str/. Epenthesis is usually found in word-initial positions which learners break up a consonant cluster by adding a vowel. This creates extra sound into a word. For example, they may read a word ‘clap’/klæp/ as /kəlæp/ or
Next, there are consonants: among them are
On the other hand, Sally, who is a native born British Speaker, omits the “r” and extends the open-mid, back vowel (line 12). The same goes for the word “what” in which Sally omitted the letter “t” in the word “what” (line 8), which compared to American English speakers, there is no omitting of the “t.” That is why I sounded weird trying to imitate her pronunciation of the word (on the recording my intonation was slightly higher than Sally’s). This is interesting because similar results – the omitting of t’s within British English – has been observed in other research papers such as “Drilling Down to the Grain in Superdiveristy” from Ben Rampton (2015). Witnessing that evidence that has been pointed out in other articles was intriguing.
The Ebonics language consists of several elements that are native to African language. For example Akan phrases such as “yo” and “ay” are used frequently in Ebonics as greetings and responses. The gestures of speakers of African language are very similar to the gestures of Ebonics speakers (e.g. hand clapping to emphasize point). Also, the concept of call and response can be attributed to both African languages and Ebonics.
Phonological awareness is a vital skill to learning to read; however, a child’s dialect use can negatively impact their phonological awareness skills and makes it more difficult for children to learn to read (Mitri & Terry, 2014). To explain, in a study of 119 African American second graders, the children who used AAVE more frequently performed more poorly and chose more dialect sensitive responses, or words that contain features that vary depending on dialect use, on the phonemic awareness tasks than the children who used AAVE less frequently. For example, Mitri and Terry (2014) provided the children with a common word, such as bed, and asked the participants to select the word that resembled the initial word from three possible responses: a SAE match, such as red, a dialect sensitive match, such as net, and a neutral match, such as egg. In this instance, the children who spoke AAVE more frequently were more likely to choose “net” than their peers who used AAVE less frequently due to the common devoicing of final consonants. Additionally, the children with higher phonological awareness had increased reading ability (Mitri & Terry, 2014).
Lynsie and I went to Washington Irving Elementary School every Thursday this semester from 8:45 until 9:45 in the mornings. While at the school, we worked with a first-grade student named Reid. The first two weeks at the school, we spent time getting to know Reid and testing him using the Informal Reading Inventory. We used this test to see what we needed to work on with him to help him master each area.
Jared was able to elicit /f/ in isolation as well as at the syllable level, however; he struggled at the word level and beyond. At the age of six, I took it upon myself to help my brother learn the tongue placement of /th/ and /t/. Once he understood where his tongue
The IEP form that I examined is not the same student I worked with during my lesson. The IEP that I observed was for Student I. Student I has difficulties with writing the correct letter formations and with line placement. He also has a speech impediment when it comes to pronouncing certain words. While examining the student’s form I found that the student receives help for his speech impediment from a speech therapist at the school and he also receives help from an occupational therapist for his line formation and placement. Student I is in a regular classroom and routinely gets help from his therapists and from the ESE teacher.
This article was found using a search through a search on EBSCOhost and the intended audience is classroom teachers and speech-language pathologists. Its intent is to help structure a collaborative classroom environment between classroom teachers and speech-language pathologists (SLPs) including ideas on how to structure communication between classroom teachers and SLPs to increase student performance. The ideas are logical and the article acknowledges many limitations and constraints for collaboration between teachers and SLPs while reminding the reader of the importance and gains that can be made through a partnership. In a school building, the SLP is a valuable resource which can be overlooked. In my building, we have pull-out speech services
The sound system is more complex and inconsistent in English than in other languages. There are more than 40 different phonemes in spoken English, and there can be a number of different phonemes to represent the same sound (for example, f and ph'). Phonics helps us to look at the different letter patterns together, along with their sounds. Synthetic phonics puts the teaching of letters and sounds into an orderly framework. It requires the reader to learn simpler individual sounds first, then start to put them together to form words, and finally progress to the most complex combinations.
The average school-based speech-language pathologist (SLP) is likely to maintain a caseload that consists of a significant number of children with phonological disorders (Gierut, 2001). According to the American Speech-Language Hearing Association (1999), 10-15% of preschoolers have a speech disorder. Given the lifelong importance of phonologic learning and intelligibility in daily functioning, there is a need to utilize effective intervention strategies for targeting these skills. Goal-attack strategies, as stated by Fey (1986), arrange treatment in a way that works to eliminate a child’s phonological errors and restructure the phonological system. The vertical, horizontal, and cyclical goal-attack strategies have been applied to multiple
As you can notice, on my sample (III), the ‘speaker A’ pronounces [aʝuðaɾ]
Therefore, Dr. Giselle is able to provide an adequate analysis of the research data. Stephanie L. Hensel is a researcher in the Department of Education at the University of Michigan with an expertise in phonology, morphology, and sociolinguistics. The audience of the article is likely people who are interested in the field of sociolinguistics, particularly AAE. Overall, the article is more informative that
It is necessary for speech pathology programs to include an audiology course because the two fields are very closely related. Many speech language pathologists will most likely work with individuals who have multiple impairments, including hearing loss (Welling & Ukstins 2019). The auditory mechanism is also very important to the development of speech sounds and language. Having good hearing is crucial to a child’s success with speaking and participating in social situations as well. If a child has issues with proper social interaction, they will most likely go to a speech language pathologist for services.
As is evident, English is not my native language, and I did not study any English before I came to America. For this reason, when I learned that I would come to America to study, I was really worried. Also, English pronunciation is very different from Vietnamese pronunciation. For example, Vietnamese does not have any sound, such as “t, d, s, and z”, at the end of each word, and each word only has one syllable. By contrast, in English, we have to pronounce exactly every sound at the end, and one English word may have one, two, three, four, or even five syllables.
Phonemic Awareness and Phonics As a ESL student, I learned a lot information to teach young students to read, pronounce letters and words. “English is an alphabetic language, and children learn crack this code as they learn about phonemes (sound), graphemes (letters), and graph phonemic (letter-sound) relationship (Tompkins, p.103). My first language`s letters sounds never changed, but in English it changes when different letters come together for example “sh”, “ch” and words are cat and cent. When you read these word, sound is changing first letter of words even same letter.