Tip Tap Start Pronunciation Station

-Reflections As a future teacher, it is important for me to learn different ways to identify and pay special attention to the errors that my students make and those that could become a problem for them. All this is because most of them are errors that could be frozen in time or could be forgotten as a result of a lack of correction. For those and other reasons, it's important to work side by side with our students and find the right teaching methods for them. Detecting errors from Spanish speakers sometimes results in less complications because they are the same that we commit. The other half of the time, it results in learning new errors that maybe we do not expect or know. Finding and designing exercises that look attractive but in the same way are educational for our students takes time and a lot of research if you want a creative result. I tried to base the exercises on games that both Spanish speakers and native English speakers are familiar with, so they could enjoy them and...

       We are a page interested in native Spanish speakers whose second language in the learning process is English.      Our team is made up of three authors, Dina Cruz, Grecia Barahona and Dariela López. 

 - Vowel Pronunciation Description of the problem: People whose first language (L1) or mother tongue is Spanish used to struggle with the pronunciation of vowels because of many reasons, among them, we can count the fact that for us in Spanish there is no difference between them, what you look at is what you have, the vowel sound of ‘a’ is an ‘ah’ no more varieties as in the words ‘manzana’ or ‘cangrejo’, meanwhile, in English, you can have a vowel with two different sounds such as ‘a’ that has an /æ/ or /ɑ/ sounds, we can see it in the words ‘hat’ or ‘heart’. This is because English is not a phonographic language, meaning that the way in which we write words won’t be the same way we spell them. Another interference appears because in Spanish we have five vowel sound positions in pronunciation, which changes in English and that has around twenty distinct vowel sound positions, for example, Spanish /u/ is made when we place our tongue at the back of our mouths, but in English /u/ in...

 - Problem with the pronunciation of the sound of “s” Description of the problem: Spanish speakers tend to add an “e” sound in words, beginning with an “s” and a consonant. For instance, words such as  "speak" and "star"  are pronounced as "espeak" or "estar," respectively. This occurs as a consequence of Spanish words lacking sounds like st, sl, sm, sk, and sp (consonant clusters) at the beginning of a word. The proper way to pronounce the "s" sound is to elevate the tongue tip to the top gum ridge and hiss voicelessly (Clarey & Dixon, 1963, p. 64). Exercises 1📌 This activity will provide the students with a list of tongue twisters to practice “s” pronunciation.  Instructions: 1.  The activity starts with the teacher randomly selecting a student to choose a number from 1 to 10. Then, depending on the number chosen, the teacher will ask the student to say a tongue twister again. 2. After saying the tongue twister, the student ...

-TH Pronunciation Description of the problem: This is one of the most common mistakes that Spanish speakers face. The “th” has two sounds: one is voiceless /θ/ and the other is voiced /ð/. Usually, people confuse /θ/ with /t/ or /s/, for example, “thank” is pronounced as “sank” or “tank”. They also confuse /ð/ with /d/, for example, “they” is pronounced as “day”. The reason why this happens is that the “TH” sound does not exist in Spanish, also both, voiceless and voiced pronunciations of “th”, are made with the tip of the tongue against the cutting edge of the upper front teeth, and when Spanish speakers try to make this sound, they make it with the tip of the tongue on the gum ridge behind the upper front teeth.       Production of /θ/ sound. According to Clarey and Dixson (1963), to make this sound you must: “place the tip of the tongue against the cutting edge of the upper front teeth; the breath is then blown out without voice.” (p. 43). Examples using comp...

 -ED Pronunciation in Regular Verbs Description of the problem: A recurrent mistake that Spanish-speaking EFLs make is the pronunciation of past and participle forms of regular verbs. For example, in the word ”entertained” the correct pronunciation of “ed” is /d/; however, many people add an extra syllable and pronounce it like /id/. We believe the root of this problem is mainly due to the lack of knowledge of the rules in pronunciation of past regular forms and the concept of voiced and voiceless sounds.  The -ED pronunciation in past and participle forms of regular verbs is pronounced in three ways: /d/, /t/, and /id/. The /d/ pronunciation is made when the verb ends in voiced sounds (/b/, /g/, /j/, /v/, /z/, /ð/,/n/, /m/, /w/, and vowels). For example: Played, lived, earned, allowed, begged, rubbed.  The /t/ pronunciation is made when the verb ends in voiceless sounds (/p/, /f/, /s/, /ʃ/, /ʧ/, /k/, and /θ/). For example: Washed, watched, stopped, cracked, blessed, laug...

Error Analysis and Its Importance in Teaching English   Since linguistics is a broad subject, it had to be divided into numerous fields in order to adequately study each one. Humans generally employ comparison to comprehend and process new information. This is the origin of Contrastive Analysis. It emerged in the 40s and 50s with the works of Charles Fries and Robert Lado as a branch of linguistics that deals with the linguistic description of two or more separate structures. These comparisons are a wonderful tool for language instruction because they illustrate how phonological systems, grammatical structures, and vocabulary differ between languages. They also highlight areas of similarity and difference between two languages. Khansir (2012) claims that as a result of contrastive analysis, a new area of Applied Linguistics called Error Analysis was developed in the 1960s. Error Analysis demonstrated that learned errors were caused by the learner's reflection of some universal te...