Importance Of Pronunciation Problems In Pronunciation

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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 …show more content…

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

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