A Simple Home Recipe For Making Tasty Sounds
...By Yvonne C.J. Wotulo
English has truly proven itself to be the most internationally used language – particularly in speaking – by non-native speakers. In this case, there’re two kinds of non-native English speakers: the speakers who have English as a second or additional language, and the growing number of speakers, which have reached 750 million (Graddol, The Future of English?, 1997), learning English as a foreign language (EFL).
The number of EFL learners has in years grown rapidly especially because of the globalization era, that requires the use of English. Since these learners are spread in various kinds of areas which have their own unique local languages, it has become difficult for the learners to speak English fluently. They may have certain accents. These accents, as well as the patterns of error that the learners repeatedly make, reflect the characteristics of their mother tongue. For example, according to Phonology Yearbook 4 (1987), in Kimatuumbi (a language in Tanzania), there’re phrasal tone insertions; and in modern Greek and modern Italian, there’re fast speech rules, involving elision of vowels. Moreover, as many of us have probably known that in Japanese, there’s a tendency of inserting vowels into consonants (which is why it’s apparently troublesome for the Japanese to say the English words that contain double to triple consonants, such as ‘snack bar’, which is pronounced as ‘su - næ-ku - b^: - ru’). In our mother tongue, Bahasa Indonesia, it’s not common to have s sounds at the end of words ended by consonants (of course other than ‘s’ itself), especially such consonants which have ʃ, ʤ, ʧ, endings. Or, to have consonants (sounds) between s sounds (eg. tests ). These problems have become a ‘pain in the neck’ for English teachers when teaching speaking skills. Then, how can we overcome such problems, particularly when teaching...
View Full Essay
