Pronunciation



Introduction

Phonetics and Phonology forms an important element of learning English as a language. Phonetics and Phonology are two important tools that can aid the teachers in their quest to help the students gain a better grasp at comprehending and articulating the speech sounds pertaining to the English language (Burns & Joyce, 1997).

Phonetics and Phonology are the branches of linguistics that are associated with the study of speech sounds. Phonetics is concerned with articulation or the physical properties associated with individual speech sounds, where as phonology is concerned with the pattern of sound organization specific to specific languages. Phonology can further be broken up into two subsets - segmental and suprasegmental phonologies. Segmental phonology stresses on the physiological aspect of speech and can be broken up into phonemes, vowels, consonants and diphthongs . Whereas suprasegmental phonology is concerned with the acoustic aspect of speech sounds, and thus focus on individual syllables , word and sentence stresses, intonation rhythm and connected speech.

English and Burmese are two very dissimilar languages, originating from two completely different regions across the globe, and having very distinct linguistic differences - making it tough for natives of Myanmar to grasp the articulations and pronunciations of the English language. There are several differences in the phonetics used in Burmese and English. This results in a significant difference in their pronunciations and this poses difficulties for them while they speak English at the national and international levels. The various possible difficulties include the following:

Spellings Inaccuracies

Pronunciation Inaccuracies

Phonetic inaccuracies

Difficulties in learning/understanding English

Communication breakdowns due to unintelligibility as native speakers or non-native speakers may not understand the words and what the speaker intend to say.

Therefore it is important that Burmese learners of English learn English pronunciation in order to speak and comprehend English appropriately.

The Aim of the Essay

This discussion will give consideration to the four main pronunciation errors identified in the narration of a non-native speaker. The narration analyzed for the purpose of this assignment was the recording of a free speech made by the subject.



Native Language Background of the non-native speaker

The speaker's native language background is Burmese. She is from Myanmar but she has lived in Singapore for nearly ten years. She went to secondary school here and did her first degree in business in Singapore Management University. This leads me to reasonably believe that the subject's current accent is a mix of Singaporean and Myanmar.

Overall, although she has a foreign accent, her pronunciation does not sound heavily accented. She has never learnt English pronunciation before because in Myanmar, there is no systematic teaching of English Pronunciation in schools.

Four Main Pronunciation Errors

Four main pronunciation errors were found in her free speech. They show the differences that are caused due to lack of accuracy in phonetics and phonology while speaking English. In this paper, I will focus on three segnmental errors and one suprasegmental errors made by the speaker.

Segmental Errors

Problem between the sound /?/ and /t/ One of the noticeable segmental errors was the inability of ...