Third Error

-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 will say a number from the list for the next participant and so on until all the classmates have passed.

* Additionally, students in the classroom could practice pronouncing these tongue twisters as homework by recording their pronunciations and sending them to the teacher.

2📌

Pictionary

1. This game has 12 cards that contain pictures on it, the class will be divided into couples, and from those couples, one will select the card and draw the picture on the board meanwhile his/her partner tries to guess what the draw is, and then he/she has two minutes to say the word aloud to the rest of the class. The same for all the gamers.

2. The couple that has the most correct answers wins the game.

Comments

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...

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...

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...

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