Abstract
This study investigated the English fricative and stop pronunciation errors produced by Pattani-Malay learners of English. The participants, speaking L1 Malay, were recruited from fifth and sixth graders at Thamwittaya Mulniti School, Yala province, Thailand. The major research instruments used to examine the errors were the word list reading task and the sentence reading task. The findings of this research demonstrate that Pattani-Malay learners of English seemed to have difficulty in producing errors in some specific English fricative sounds in particular positions. The medial voiced labiodental fricative /v/ and the medial voiced interdental fricative /ð/ were apparently the most problematic. The errors in pronouncing the voiced labiodental fricative /v/ and the voiced interdental fricative /ð/ in the initial and final positions were ranked second, followed by the final voiced palato-alveolar fricative /?/ errors and the final voiceless interdental fricative /?/ errors respectively. The results revealed that the learner’s problems in pronouncing English fricatives and stops are mainly attributed to first language transfer.
Highlights
Bohn and Flege (1992) mentioned that the similarities of some sounds in different languages will not help language learners to produce the sounds similar to their first language correctly, and most researchers agree that there are a lot of difficulties in pronunciation of the languages which are different from their mother tongue (Bohn & Flege, 1992; Trofimovich, Gatbonton, & Segalowitz, 2007)
5.1 L1 Transfer The findings show that six significant sounds seemed to be the most difficult for articulating by the participants whose first language was Pattani-Malay; these were the voiced labiodental fricative /v/, the voiced interdental fricative /ð/, the voiced alveolar fricative /z/, the voiced palato-alveolar fricative / /, the voiceless interdental fricative / /, and the voiceless palato-alveolar fricative / /
The stops and fricatives are two categories of English sounds that seem to be the difficulties in articulating by learners of English
Summary
Bohn and Flege (1992) mentioned that the similarities of some sounds in different languages will not help language learners to produce the sounds similar to their first language correctly, and most researchers agree that there are a lot of difficulties in pronunciation of the languages which are different from their mother tongue (Bohn & Flege, 1992; Trofimovich, Gatbonton, & Segalowitz, 2007). Many studies focusing on the error analysis of pronunciation have shown that the most errors produced by the L1 speakers of Malay and Indonesian, which are really close to Pattani-Malay, are fricatives and stops. Azizi, Jamil and Omar (2013) proved that L1 does have certain influence on the pronunciation of the English language among L1 Malay speakers. The subjects in the study tended to substitute other sounds existing in their L1 for the target fricative and stop sounds of English consonants. This present study mainly focuses on these two problematic sounds
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