Difficulties in the Pronunciation of English Sounds by Asian Speakers

Abstract

This project was concerned with the interlanguage phonology of Asian High School students in Western Australia. The purpose of this study was (a) to identify and classify the errors in the pronunciation of English sounds in Asian High School students, and (b) to uncover the possible causes of learners' errors. The subjects were 100 Asian students from seven State and Independent High Schools. They had originally arrived in Australia as refugees and had completed an initial year of intensive second language instruction. Twelve subjects were selected as longitudinal case studies so as to examine learner-strategies used as the interlanguages moved towards the target language. Speech samples were recorded through experimental elicitations and free speech. Two conclusions were drawn from the error analysis: (a) although most of the errors stemmed from L1 interference, some of the errors could not be predicted through contrastive analysis. Variability in the learner's interlanguage could be due to overgeneralization, approximation, the intrinsic difficulty of some L2 sounds, unfavourable phonological environments, the nature of the task and even psychological constraints, and (b) the types, frequency of errors and learner-strategies revealed that the most difficult sounds appeared to be the apicoalveolar fricative /S/ in word-final position, the voiceless apicodental fricative /θ/ in word-initial position, and consonant clusters.