Taiwanese Junior High School Students’ English Liquid Consonants Production

Abstract

This study was to explore whether junior high school students could produce English liquid consonants well. Two purposes were explored in this study. First, explore which liquid consonants (/r/ or /l/) do junior high school students perform better. Second, to probe which position (word-initial, word intervocalic or word-final) of English liquid consonants (/r/ or /l/) do those students perform better or worse. Two research questions would be represent in this study. The sample of the study consisted of 60 junior high school students in Southern Taiwan, and they all from Grade 7th. The production tests were administered for all participants in the study. Thirty-six words in the wordlist that included /l/ and /r/ in word-initial, word intervocalic or word-final would be used to test in this study. The results revealed that there was a significant mean difference between the /l/ and /r/. In the word-initial /l/ and /r/, most participants would produce those two sounds better than other positions. In word intervocalic, intervocalic /r/ would be produced better than intervocalic /l/. In word final, final /r/ would be produced better than final /l/. In final /l/, all participants in this study did not produce the final /l/.The main finding indicated that the participants produced better /r/ than /l/. Pedagogical implications and suggestions for future study were showed following.