STORIES OF A RETIRED TEACHER
Comedy in Pronunciation: L1 Interference
What did you say today’s special was again? ‘Flied lice’?
As I write this, I am transported back to my school days. I remember my English teacher and her funny anecdote. She said:
“I’m dirty and my husband is dirty too!”
She had the whole class in stitches. What she actually meant was, “I’m thirty and my husband is thirty-two!” I never fail to tell this joke to my students. I use this anecdote to always remind them that when they pronounce words wrongly, they will simply pass the wrong message. Poor pronunciation can be unpleasant or comical and often results in the speaker being misunderstood.
As a retired English teacher, I have years of experience teaching English as a Second Language (ESL) students of diverse cultural backgrounds. Over the years, I have had my fair share of hilarious moments of mispronunciations created by first language (L1) interference. I used to teach a small group of Asian students who came from an environment that did not offer much opportunity for spoken English, and they also spoke in an accent that resembled their respective L1.
Here, I discuss some of the common problems faced by my students and what I did to help them overcome their pronunciation difficulties. Distinguishing the ‘liquid’ sounds of the phonemes /r/ and /l/ was one of the many problems. The word ‘rice’ /raɪs/ was pronounced as /laɪs/, thus giving rise to the popular joke about ‘flied lice’. Given the acoustic similarities between the two sounds, many ESL students found it difficult to distinguish the /r/ and /l/ sounds. Another problem with some ESL learners was getting them to pronounce the word ‘problem’ itself! It usually came off as ‘pohblem’ /pɔːbləm/ or ‘ploblem’ /ˈplɒbləm/. Again, the confusion here was with the /r/ and /l/ sound.
The /θ/ phoneme sound in the word ‘thin’ /θɪn/ was usually pronounced with the /t/ phoneme sound as in ‘tin’ /tɪn/ and ‘the’ /ðə/ is pronounced with the plosive /d/ sound as in ‘der’ /də/. Therefore, words such as ‘mother’ /ˈmʌðə/ and ‘father’ /ˈfɑːðə/ were often mispronounced as ‘mader’ /ˈmʌdər/ and ‘fadur’ /ˈfɑːdər/.
To add to the list of confusing sounds, are words with the long and short forms of the vowel sounds. For example, a student once wrote this sentence:
The thief broke into the house to ‘still’ /stɪl/ some jewellery.
The intended word was ‘steal’ /stiːl/ but because of the difficulty in distinguishing between the long and short vowel sounds, he had spelt the word wrongly. Therefore, it is important to ensure that students are given enough practice to identify sounds that are not commonly found in their L1. Pronunciation exercises may be difficult, but when students do not learn correct phoneme sounds at an early age, they rarely ever learn to pronounce these words correctly.
To address some of these issues, I integrated pronunciation drills of the various phonological sounds with my students. For example, I taught them minimal pairs such as ‘bit’ / ‘beat’ (to distinguish between the long and short vowel sounds) and ‘pill’ / ‘bill’ (to teach the phoneme sounds). ‘Pill’ and ‘bill’ are good examples to give because they are both bilabial sounds which can be tricky for ESL learners. An exercise that proved useful in teaching these sounds, was to have the learners place their palm in front of their mouths. I then asked them to feel the difference in the air released when they said the sounds /p/ and /b/. This created an instant awareness in the learners as they were able to ‘feel’ the production of sound and understand the difference.
I also introduced tongue twisters with special attention given to the correct pronunciation of the /æ/ sound. For example:
The fat cat sat on a mat.
Such exercises are useful because they teach students how the /æ/ sound is pronounced with different consonants. Exaggerating their pronunciation was a good way to enable students to understand the production of the different phonemic sounds. For example, when teaching the difference between the /r/ and /l/ sounds, students were asked to deliberately roll their tongues when saying the /r/ sound. This was a fun activity as they enjoyed rolling their tongues and creating the vibratory ‘rrrrr’. Initially, they found this challenging, but were eventually able to say words such as ‘rice’, ruler’ or ‘rubber’ correctly. This was a huge accomplishment for these students as they do not have the opportunity to converse in the English language given that practice in spoken English was often restricted to the classroom. The key to these different exercises is consistency. With consistent practice, students were able to identify the different sounds more accurately and in the long run learnt to speak and express themselves with confidence.
