Академический Документы
Профессиональный Документы
Культура Документы
FROM 4TH, 7TH AND 8TH SEMESTER OF THE DEGREE IN FOREIGN LANGUAGES
RIONEGRO
2018
2
CONTENT
JUSTIFICATION 3
QUESTION 5
OBJECTIVES 5
THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK 5
DEVELOPMENT 12
FINDINGS 17
CONCLUSION 19
REFERENCES 29
3
JUSTIFICATION
This research paper will be meaningful to three different aspects: to the context where
the research will take place, to the formation of future foreign languages’ teachers, and to the
Firstly, the results that this project may have, will be useful for the participants
because they will be able to recognize what are some common challenging aspects of their
pronunciation and this will allow them to focus their attention on how are they uttering certain
phonemes, having the opportunity to correct themselves and monitor their language process.
Therefore, learners could develop their own strategies so that they can improve their speaking
ability.
Additionally, this research project can have many benefits for those who are
successfully, for this reason, future teachers could use the results of this study as a instrument
to know on what to center their attention more. Likewise, this study could be a starting point
or a reference for future teachers who want to research in similar fields in their context.
Lastly, EFL teachers will also find contributions from the results this research may
get. On one hand, they could create new strategies for their courses based on the outcomes
of this study, which can benefit the learning process of their students. On the other hand, this
research could work as an evaluation process for the foreign languages program at
Universidad Católica de Oriente to gain awareness about the job they are doing and how they
could improve it. At the same time, it would enrich the process of teachers and students in
4
general, as it will provide them with answers to questions they may have been asking
What are some common challenges regarding pronunciation that students from 4th,
7th and 8th semester of the Degree in Foreign Languages face during their learning process of
English at UCO?
OBJECTIVES
General Objective
To describe some challenges regarding pronunciation that pre-service teachers from General
Phonetics, Applied Phonetics and Assessment courses (2018-2) of the degree in foreign
Specific Objectives
- To analyze students’ perceptions concerning the aspects they consider they need to
THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
In this stage, we will describe certain concepts that are key to our research paper in
order to have a clearer view of the theoretical framework that will be taken into account when
proceeding with the data collection methods exercises during the research and findings.
competences regarding the speaking skill. Yule (2014), defines phonetics as “the general
study of characteristics of speech sounds” (p.27). In this case, articulatory phonetics, being
6
“the study of how speech sounds are made, or articulated” (p.27)., is a key concept for this
research being that we will focus on phonetic aspects that are challenging for students in their
learning process of English as a foreign language, in terms of phonemes and how students
produce them.
Phonetics is the science of speech sounds, or, from a practical point of view, the art
of pronunciation. Phonetics is to the science of language generally what mathematics
is to astronomy and the simplest phenomena of language. It is equally necessary in
the theoretical and practical study of languages (p. 4).
These definitions of phonetics are accurate because they support the importance of
this subfield of Linguistics with respect to the English learning process and it is evident in
Keeping on the same field, the concept of pronunciation has been defined by several
authors, but we decided to focus on two of them since their definitions go along with our
purpose. Dalton & Seidlhofer (1994) define pronunciation as “the production of significant
sound”, and at the same time, they proposed two reasons why it is such an important concept.
First, “it is used as part of a code of a particular language […] In this senses we can talk about
pronunciation as the production and reception of sounds of speech.” (p. 3). The other reason
they gave to the importance of this concept is that “it is used to achieve meaning in contexts
of use. Here the code combines with other factors to make communication possible. In this
sense, we can talk about pronunciation with reference to acts of speaking.” (p. 3) This latter
reason is the one in which we want to emphasize because we consider that pronunciation is
impossible for the listener to comprehend the message that the transmitter wants to express.
In this sense, intelligibility has to do in a certain way with this aspect and later, we will see
7
why. On the other hand, this statement is also supported by Pennigton (1996) who establishes
that
Then, when speaking about language teaching, Enligsh in this case, it is vital for
teachers to develop a good level in terms of pronunciation so they can teach the language
correctly, as well as students obtain valid information about the English language. As a
result, students will build up their oral competence accurately and, later, they can manage
Now, with the intention of having an approach to our topic which is about some
common challenges regarding pronunciation that students from 4th to 8th semester of the
degree in foreign languages face during their learning process of English in their courses at
UCO, we looked for some studies that focused on similar aspects such as pronunciation,
phonetics instruction, phonemes, word stress, etc. During the reading exercise we could find
two relevant research papers which are related to our subject of interest. Hereunder, we are
Develop Their Confidence in EFL Oral Skills”. The questions they wanted to answer
8
who are trained in pronunciation possess confidence when producing in the EFL?
The participants were two elementary English language groups of the Language
School of Universidad Veracruzana in Xalapa. There were observed and labeled as Group
A and Group B for research purposes. Although there were 18 students in Group A and 11
in Group B, only eight students were chosen to be interviewed later on . Their ages ranged
from 18 to 20 years old. The reason behind choosing these participants was that by being
students of the lowest English level, they were very likely to have many pronunciation
problems and their teachers were also very likely to have to deal with these. Therefore, this
program at Universidad Veracruzana dealt with pronunciation and the important role they
play as one of the main input sources for students to acquire pronunciation habits.
In order to collect data, they decided to use three different types of instrument: class
The analysis of the evidence collected from class observations and the reading aloud
activity helped to find out if students, who had received some pronunciation instruction in
their EFL classes, developed confidence when producing or pronouncing words and
sentences in English. It became apparent, in the analysis of data collected through class
observations and the notes taken, that when students were asked to read a list of words, one
per student, they always used a rising intonation at the end of the word when they were not
sure about their pronunciation. They used this strategy implicitly ask their EFL teachers for
feedback or help. It proved to be a good student strategy as they immediately got what they
were looking for: either their teacher’s approval or the error correction. All student
9
participants attributed their lack of confidence when pronouncing some words to their lack
of practice.
pronunciation course could be and that teachers give more instructions to their students
The second study we looked at was about the role of training pre-service teachers in
second language pronunciation. The focus was on how cognitions about how TESL changed
on students after taking a phonology and pronunciation teaching course and how do these
changes compare to those experienced by TESL student teachers who do not receive any
university who were enrolled in a phonology and pronunciation teaching course offered in
the fall term. The same instructor taught two groups, and both included students in a four-
teaching in their first year were recruited to participate as a comparison group. The subset of
treatment participants who were interviewed represented different age groups and birthplaces
cognitions before and after the theoretical portion of the TESL course in phonology and
pronunciation teaching. The second DC method was interviews, which took place after the
treatment participants finished their teaching practicum in early December and involved a
The objective of the Pronunciation Teaching Course carried out during the study was
to provide students with an overview of the sound system of English organized around three
man topics: sound, word and phrase-level phonology, to demonstrate to students how
help them create materials for teaching pronunciation and to provide them with an
Regarding the results, there were changes in beliefs about pronunciation teaching and
learning. The comparison group agreed significantly less than ESL learners benefit from
paying conscious attention to the input and becoming aware of how different areas are
produced. This agreement increased for the treatment group. Students realized that teaching
pronunciation is seriously important and phonetics is key element when teaching English.
There were also changes in self-efficacy; questionnaires showed that participants beliefs
about their knowledge of the subject matter and their beliefs about their skills as
pronunciation teachers. The treatment group’s change was greater than the comparison
group. The phonology course also helped participants become more aware of their
limitations. There was evidence about the fact that being a native teacher wasn’t necessary
to teach pronunciation and that knowing about pronunciation teaching increased participants
Lastly, we also found a study which was carried out in Spain during 2015 by Calvo,
with the purpose of finding out the specific problems with English sounds of a group of
Spanish learners of English belonging to different levels of proficiency. For the development
of this study a total of 25 people participated, all of whom belonged to different levels of
education and their ages ranged from 14 to 24. In total, there were seven males and thirteen
11
females and they were all enrolled in four different educational stages: first and third year of
high school, and the third and fifth year of a BA university degree in English studies at the
In order to collect the necessary data, three research materials took place:
- A personal interview where participants were asked to talk about a specific topic (hobbies,
- An oral description where students described orally some pictures of a man in different
stages of a bad day in his life that were taken from a course book by Granger and Beaumont.
- An aloud reading of an EFL textbook addressed to third year high school students.
Regarding the results, they were categorized according to the research materials.
During the oral descriptions, students had specific pronunciation problems with the
consonants /r/ in all positions and /d/ and /t/ mainly in -ed endings, the differences between
the vowel sounds /æ/versus /a:/, and the diphthong /ǝʊ/. Then, during the oral description,
problems with the diphthong /aɪ/ and the distinction between /e/ and /З:/ were found. Lastly,
throughout the development of the out loud reading, the researcher was able to identify the
highests difficulties with the consonant /r/ and /d/ endings, also the distinction between /ɪ/
To conclude, we consider these studies will help us find the most accurate data
collection methods, so we can come up with better findings. Thanks to them, we also
identified the possible contributions that we may provide to the Degree in Foreign
Languages.
12
DEVELOPMENT
Participants
20 students from the Assessment course (7th semester) of the Degree in Foreign Languages
(2018-2).
We decided to choose them for our research paper because at the beginning of the
observations we realized that the Phonetics courses were not enough as the students were not
pronunciation aspects. Then, we agreed to observe a different kind of class, which was the
Assessment course from 7th semester, being that students were doing presentations, so they
spoke in English all the time and that was exactly what we needed to check some aspects.
The data collection methods we implemented were surveys for the General and
Applied Phonetics courses and observations for all the courses. The surveys were designed
challenges when pronouncing diverse English words (open questions) and phonemes that
On the other hand, when we started observing the General Phonetics classes, we were
just centered on phonemes, but as time went on, we found out that there were more important
13
aspects to keep in mind with respect to pronunciation, such as word stress, intonation and
Surveys
The intention of the first question was to know if students had habits for monitoring
their speaking (pronunciation) and which ones. In the General Phonetics (GP) group, ten of
twelve students said they monitored their pronunciation through dictionaries (phonetic
transcription), imitation of videos and native speakers, lip sync and practicing with other
On the other hand, in the Applied Phonetics (AP) group, all the participants said they
monitored their pronunciation by using dictionaries, music, videos, repeating words to get
the right pronunciation, recording themselves, and practicing with native speakers who
corrected them.
The purpose of the second question was to identify if there were challenges that they
normally faced when speaking English and which ones. In the GP group, all the participants
answered they did had challenges when speaking English, like the ending of regular verbs in
simple past (ed), word stress, fluency, manner of articulation, diphthongs, vowel sounds and
pronunciation of several consonants together. They also mentioned specific words and
In the AP group, all the members considered they had challenges when speaking
English (pronunciation), for example the ending of regular verbs in simple past (ed), word
14
stress, and they pointed out words like comfortable, hopelessness, resyllabification, strength,
development, throw, though, thought and though; and the differenciation between phonemes
In order to get the information about the phonemes students found challenging, we
used a rating scale being 5 the easiest sound and 1 the most challenging (See figure 1.). These
phonemes were selected from the features that we perceived challenging in the first
Observations
When it comes to this method, we were able to identify several phonemes that
students did not consider when pronouncing different words (See figure 2).
Phoneme Word(s)
barbaric, action.
meaningful.
prepare.
audience, broadcast.
/ɚ/ Brother.
/ɑ/ Body.
prize.
/ð/ Though.
/h/ Holistic.
Figure 2.
word stress and ending of regular verbs in simple past (See figure 3).
famous.
coherence.
Police.
Details.
Upset.
Figure 3.
17
FINDINGS
In agreement with the information we gathered from the surveys, we could say that
both GP and AP groups had similar results. Firstly, they coincided with some of the strategies
to monitor their speaking. These are dictionaries and imitation of native speakers (from
videos and music too). Concerning challenges they normally face when pronunciating
English words, both groups agreed on issues they have, like phonemes, word stress and
The GP group established that the phoneme /ə/ required more effort for them to
achieve, and the pronunciation of more than two consonants together too, while the AP
group stated that the phonemes /ɝ/, /ɚ/, /θ/, /dʒ/, /ʒ/ and /ð/ were the laborious ones.
Additionally, the GP group found demanding to utter words that contain the phoneme /θ/.
In relation to the rating scale, we found that this was the stage in which both groups
concurred the most in respect to the phonemes they considered challenging (See figure 1).
phonemes when speaking are vowel sounds, more specifically these ones: /æ/, /ə/, /ɪ/, /ɔ/
and /ɝ/. Nevertheless, they also face challenges when producing consonant sounds like /s/,
/z/, /v/, /j/, /θ/, /dʒ/, /ʒ/, /t/, /r/ and /ʃ/.
while the consonant sounds are challenging in regard to production. This, because during
the observations we could identify that students did uttered vowel sounds correctly when
the teacher asked them to do it, but when they were speaking spontaneously, they were not
18
able to distinguish which vowel sound was the correct one. On the other hand, we observed
that consonant sounds were not difficult for them to differentiate, but they required more
The phonemes /s/ and /z/ can be laborious being that students do not know or apply
When there is a verb in present simple (third person of the singular) and the
preceding letter of the s is a vowel, we have to pronounce it with the phoneme /z/. Also,
when it comes to plurals, we must take into account the last letter of the noun in order to
know which sound is right, being aware that when the letter is voiced we use the phoneme
/z/ and when it is voiceless, the phoneme is /s/. In relation to this last phoneme, students
tend to pronounce words that start with an s as if there was and e from their native tongue
(L1) before it, like in the word snake (In this case, they would say esnake). A similar
situation happens with the endings of regular verbs in simple past, as in watched, received
or asked. We think it is due to the fact that students normally pronounce the letter e like in
their L1, which sometimes is silent or sounds /ɪ/, so they are not conscious of the different
Moreover, most of the challenges we found students have with consonant sounds,
are related to an interference from their L1 in the target language (English); these phonemes
are /t/, /r/ and /v/. Other phonemes like /j/, /w/, /dʒ/, /ʒ/ and /ð/ are demanding for them, as
these are not in their L1 so they find them new and tend to replace them with phonemes
related to their L.
19
before, but in this case with the phoneme /ʃ/, since students tend to change it for the
phoneme /tʃ/ and we consider this happens because it is very common in their L1.
Diphthongs were another issue we noticed when students were speaking, as they do
not identify when they have to produce and, once again, they tend to replace the sound for
another one from their L1, for example in the word danger they would pronounce the a, as
it is pronounced in Spanish, instead of the diphthong /eɪ/, or in the words, go and so, which
they pronounce as in their L1, but actually must be pronounced with the diphthong /oʊ/.
Other related cases are evident with the diphthongs /aɪ/ and /aʊ/.
Finally, word stress was another major obstacle we could make out from our
observations. We can compare this to what happens with consonants and vowel sounds,
given that, in most cases, students have not internalized those rules which are specific to
word stress. For instance, when they find a word which works as a noun and a verb, they do
not make a distinction in their pronunciation. This happens with words like correct or
present, as these two grammatical categories have a different word stress. That is to say,
when they work as a noun, the stress goes in the first syllable, and when they work as a
CONCLUSION
As a conclusion, we said that many of these challenges students have, can be related
to fossilized errors, and that is why they normally are not conscious of them. In relation to
this, we discovered that students that are in the first stages of the degree in foreign
languages do not realize that they need to improve their oral skills. We were able to identify
20
this when comparing students’ answers in the surveys to what we observed in their classes.
Most of the surveys stated that the majority of the phonemes are easy for them to achieve,
but we found that they are actually very demanding for them. Meanwhile, students from
higher semesters have more awareness of their challenges regarding pronunciation aspects.
To answer our research question which is, what are some common challenges
regarding pronunciation that students from 4th and 8th* semester of the Degree in Foreign
Languages face during their learning process of English at UCO? We can say that the most
common challenges are regarding vowel and consonants sounds in relation to production
and recognition like /æ/, /ə/, /ɪ/, /ɔ/, /ɝ/, /s/, /z/, /v/, /j/, /θ/, /dʒ/, /ʒ/, /t/, /r/ and /ʃ/,
diphthongs, word stress, and phonetic rules for –ed endings, plurals and verbs in present
Additionally, this research exercise got us closer to the subject we want to focus on
in our research project. In this sense, the data collection process helped us discover which
methods can be more accurate when gathering the information in order to come up with
To finish, we would like to make some proposals that can help overcome these
issues in the Degree in Foreign Languages. The first one is for the teachers of the Integrated
English courses to focus more on phonetic aspects since the very beginning of the degree,
so students can avoid fossilizing errors and therefore, be more conscious of their
pronunciation. Another important factor we consider is that students should try to practice
more their oral skills outside the classroom, and help each other correcting themselves each
time they make a mistake. Keeping in the same line, students should also give relevance to
the improvement of their English learning process regarding the speaking skill, by
21
developing strategies, since the beginning, to monitor themselves when they talk. The
teacher can also foster these dynamics and, in this way, they can acquire a position of
responsibility and commitment that will help them during the whole career and professional
life, making them become not only well-trained but also ethical professionals. Lastly,
during the development of phonetics courses, teachers can work on those pronunciation
aspects that are new to the students. This means, those phonemes or rules in general which
do not exist in their native language, and that because of that, are harder to achieve.
22
Observation Format
- Automatic - Present - So
- Audio - Out
- First - /ʊ/ vs /u/
- Should
- Done
- Thought
- Preparing
- Union
- New
- Vowel
- Of
- Friend
- Action
-
25
- Organization
- Overall
- Rubric
- Disgusting
- Product
- Understand
- Argument
- Expression
- Pronunciation
- Body
- Focusing
- Such
- Underlined
- Coherence
27
- Could
- Doctor
- Fourteen
- Multiple
- Happy
- Courageous
29
REFERENCES
Dalton, C., & Seidlhofer, B. (1994). Pronunciation. Oxford, UK: Oxford University.
Sweet, H. (1964). The Practical Study of Languages: A Guide for Teachers and Learners.
London: Oxford University Press.
Tlazalo Tejada, A. C., & Basurto Santos, N. M. (2014). Pronunciation instruction and
students’ practice to develop their confidence in EFL oral skills. PROFILE Issues in
Teachers’ Professional Development, 16(2), 151-170. Retrieved from:
http://dx.doi.org/10.15446/profile.v16n2.46146
Yule, G. (2014). The Study Of Language. New York: Cambridge University Press.