Skip to main content

Conclusions & References

-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 get results quickly because they already knew the game rules. This project was a great experience since it allowed me to be as creative as I wanted and, at the same time, gave me the opportunity to have feedback on my own errors and new ways to correct, predict, and avoid them. Something that I will put into practice with my students.


A generalized error in most of us Spanish speakers learning English as a second language is the interference that our mother tongue generates, something that I found the most when I was researching. The other error that has a big presence is a lack of knowledge about the language rules. Having these in consideration, it was not that difficult in my case to identify errors in the same line. The most difficult part was creating new exercises for each of the errors that we selected, and the reason is as simple as saying that selecting exercises is sometimes a difficult task; we had to decide which of them fit best with our problem and audience.


                                                                                                    By Dariela López


Making mistakes when learning a new language is common, but there are ways to get better, and this project has various tasks that will be useful to me in the future as a teacher. Making mistakes while learning a language is common, as I previously indicated, but one of the reasons we mispronounce some words is that we think in Spanish and attempt to read it as it is written despite the fact that English phonetics are significantly different from Spanish phonetics.


The exercises in this project are the strengths, depending on how the student practices, they will get better, and I can confirm their value because the majority of them have helped me get better in English pronunciation. It was not difficult for me to identify errors and I enjoyed designing/finding the exercises for this project.


                By Grecia Barahona


It's surprising how much one can learn through a project, including new information on the subject as well as teaching strategies. I can say that creating this blog has been enjoyable, particularly when doing so with a group of committed peers who share the same enthusiasm for teaching. But not everything has been simple. Every issue and exercise needed to be carefully considered. It took some time for us to determine the appropriate activities that would truly modify how pronunciation is made.


The ability to create a fun and convenient area that we can all use was for me the benefit of doing this and what I enjoyed the most. Making blogs was a new skill we picked up. Then, realizing mistakes I make myself was extremely enlightening since I now completely understand where they come from and how to fix them. One of the numerous things I discovered was how to pronounce "th." Although this sound is similar to the Spanish letters "d" or "z," the "th" sound does not exist in Spanish. Instead, it is pronounced differently in English. Because in the first one, we put the tip of our tongue behind our front teeth gum, whereas in English, to make the “th” sound, we have to put the tip of the tongue in the cutting edge of our front teeth.


I gained a lot of knowledge about the significance of error analysis as a tool for teachers to develop fresh perspectives and correction methods for frequent errors. I'll undoubtedly design assignments for my students in the future that will aid in pronunciation correction. Additionally, I will devote adequate time to teaching pronunciation because it is crucial.

         By Dina Cruz



References


Almuslimi, F. (2020). Pronunciation errors committed by EFL learners in the English Department in Faculty of Education - Sana’a University. Millennium Journal of English Literature, Linguistics and Translation, 51–72. https://doi.org/10.47340/mjellt.v1i2.5.2020

Brenda. (2020, November 11). 6 Pronunciation Mistakes Spanish Speakers Make in English (And How To Fix Them). Oxford House. https://oxfordhousebcn.com/en/6-pronunciation-mistakes-spanish-speakers-make-in-english-and-how-to-fix-them/

Clarey, M., & Dixon, R. (1963). Pronunciation Exercises in English. (Revised Edition). SIMON & SCHUSTER, Inc.

English Path. (2022). -ED Pronunciation: A Helpful Guide. English Path. Retrieved from: https://www.englishpath.com/ed-pronunciation-a-helpful-guide/

Glottopedia. (September 19, 2009). Error analysis. Retrieved from http://www.glottopedia.org/index.php/Error_analysis

Jabeen, A., Kazemian, B. & Shahbaz, M. (September 12, 2015). The Role of Error Analysis in Teaching and Learning of Second and Foreign Language. Education and Linguistics Research, 1(2). DOI: 10.5296/elr.v1i1.8189

Khansir, A. A. (2012). Error analysis and second language acquisition. Theory and Practice in Language Studies, 2(5). https://doi.org/10.4304/tpls.2.5.1027-1032

Manuel, J. (January 14, 2022). Error Correction in Foreign Language Teaching. EnglishPost.org. https://englishpost.org/error-correction/

Shemesh, H. (2018). 10 Pronunciation mistakes Spanish speakers make. Hadar Shemesh. Retrieved from: https://hadarshemesh.com/magazine/spanish-accent/#

Touchie, H. Y. (1986). Second Language Learning Errors, Their Types, Causes, and Treatment. JALT                Journal, 8(1). https://jalt-publications.org/sites/default/files/pdf-article/art5_8.pdf



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Introduction

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...
1 comment
Read more

Fourth error

 - 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...
Post a Comment
Read more

Second Error

-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...
Post a Comment
Read more