Abstract
This research examined how Thai undergraduates acquired English marked and unmarked fricatives in their interlanguage. It also determined what sounds the learners used to replace some fricatives and how variable they were. Based on the Markedness Differential Hypothesis (MDH), unmarked fricatives are /s/ and /f/, and marked ones are /ʃ/, /v/, /z/, /θ/, /ð/, and /ʒ/. The former are considered unmarked because they are available in Thai, whereas the latter are not. The participants included three groups: high, intermediate, and low proficiency students who were studied through three types of tasks: word list, sentence list, and oral interview. The word and sentence lists required the learners to produce the target fricatives in a formal situation, while the oral interview in a natural context. The results demonstrated that marked fricatives /v/, /z/, /θ/, /ð/, and /ʒ/ were difficult for the participants. Only the advanced informants could acquire unmarked /s/ and /f/ as well as marked /ʃ/ both initially and finally. According to the MDH, the learners produced /s/, /f/, and /ʃ/ before marked /v/, /z/, /θ/, /ð/, and /ʒ/. They also appeared to produce various substitutions for the problematic sounds. Plausible explanations to account for the Thai learners’ difficulty of English fricatives involve the first language (L1) transfer, distribution of a particular sound, voicing, systematic variability, and design of a task. In pronunciation classes, teachers or educators may design tasks appropriate for their learners and employ strategies that suit their learning style preferences. Keywords: English fricatives; interlanguage; L2 phonology; markedness; variability DOI: http://doi.org/10.17576/3L-2017-2301-02
Highlights
In second language (L2) phonology, a number of studies (Bada 2001, Dickerson 1975, Jehma & Phoocharoensil 2014, Flege 1995, Shahidi, Aman & Kechot 2012, Tarone 1979) have been conducted through various approaches to explain how learners acquire phonological structures in their interlanguage
The results suggest that L1 transfer and the aspect of voicing might have played an essential role in the Icelandic speaker’s difficulty of L2 fricatives
The results demonstrated that the word list reading had reliability at the significant level r = 0.92, sentence list reading r = 0.89, and oral interview r = 0.85
Summary
In second language (L2) phonology, a number of studies (Bada 2001, Dickerson 1975, Jehma & Phoocharoensil 2014, Flege 1995, Shahidi, Aman & Kechot 2012, Tarone 1979) have been conducted through various approaches to explain how learners acquire phonological structures in their interlanguage. The first modern approach investigating such an issue is the Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis (CAH), initially proposed by Lado (1957) Under this concept, linguistic features between two languages are systematically compared in order to determine potential errors in L2 learning contexts. An Icelandic speaker, for example, does not have difficulty acquiring English /ʃ/ which is absent in his first language (L1) (Hecht & Mulford 1982). This phenomenon suggests that the CAH cannot truly account for L2 errors (Davidson 2006, Flege 1995, Hansen 2004)
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