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Pronunciation difficulty

From Teflpedia
This article is about difficulties trying to repeat a word after listening to it. For reading difficulties see Decoding difficulties.

A pronunciation difficulty is a difficulty students have with pronunciation. Depending on the students' L1, they may have difficulty distinguishing between certain vowel and consonant sounds, not to mention consonant clusters.

More often than not, these supposed difficulties depend more on the interference of L1 than on the actual difficulties posed by English, and many, if not most students will greatly improve their pronunciation by simply becoming aware of certain differences - together with a minimum of practice.

This page outlines some of the difficulties of certain sounds in individual words and links to pages with specific exercises. Intonation, linking and stress, both for individual words and for sentence stress, are also, of course, of vital importance not only in speaking “better" English, but also in understanding speech.

Vowel sounds[edit | edit source]

See: Pronunciation exercises: /əʊ/ vs /ɒ/
See: Pronunciation exercises: /ʌ/ vs /æ/
See: Pronunciation exercises: /ɪ/ vs /iː/
See: Pronunciation exercises: /uː/ vs /ʊ/
See: Pronunciation exercises: /eɪ/ vs /aɪ/

Consonant sounds[edit | edit source]

See: Pronunciation exercises: /b/ vs /v/
See: Pronunciation exercises: /d/ vs /t/ (bad vs. bat)
See: Past tense pronunciation (logged vs. locked)
See: Pronunciation exercises: /d/ vs /ð/
See: Pronunciation exercises: /dʒ/ vs /tʃ/
See: Lesson:L vs R
See: Pronunciation and decoding exercises: /s/ vs /z/
See: Pronunciation exercises: /ʃ/ vs /tʃ/
See: Pronunciation exercises: /θ/ vs /ð/
See: Pronunciation exercises: /ʒ/ vs /ʃ/

References[edit | edit source]