Skip to main content

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 words like “food” is more central and the /ʊ/ in words like “put”, is more open and central.

Exercises

1📌

The Whispering Snake. 

1. The teacher will divide the class into five rows with ten students in each of them. 

2. The last person in each row is going to have one word and he/she needs to whisper the word in the classmate’s ear in front as fast as he/she can, and so on until the word end in the first person’s ear. 

3. When all the students end, the last person in each row hearing the word needs to go in front of the classroom and tell the teacher what is the word that he/she heard. 

4. The row that gets the correct word is going to win.


2📌


Find the word and say it aloud. 

1. The class is going to be divided into groups of six.

2. The teacher is going to provide every group with a list of words and a box with the same words on it. The game is going to have three rounds. 

3. Three members are going to be the voice and the other three are the takers. The voice team is going to say the word to the taker team so he/she can select between the words in the box.

4. When the group has all the words from their list, the leader is going to raise his/her hand, and if he/she is the first to raise the hand, and the word is formed and pronounced in a correct way, the group wins points. 

5. The group with more correct words wins.      





   

 



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

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