Teaching Initial Consonant Clusters
I. INTRODUCTION
In a successful communication, anyone taking part in the communication has to understand what their partner speaks. That a speaker mispronounces a word is likely to cause difficulties for other people to comprehend the message he wants to express. Clearly, a proper pronunciation can never inhibit successful communication. Particularly in the context of learning English as a second or foreign language (ESL/EFL), native – like pronunciation surely helps the native people understand what English learners speak. Without doubt, a learner who consistently mispronounces a range of phonemes or inaccurately makes use of suprasegmental elements, such as stress or intonation, has difficulty in understanding and being understood by a native speaker. Consequently, teaching pronunciation plays a paramount role in ESL/ EFL classroom and also an extremely thorny task for all English teachers. In fact, Avery and Ehrlich (1995: xiii) confirmed that in the teaching of pronunciation “biological, socio-cultural, personality, and linguistic factors” should be taken into consideration preliminarily because these factors are known to “affect the acquisition of the sound system of a second language”. Thus, the factors occupy a crucial role because they affect greatly the way a learner acquires a second language. Take the linguistic factor for example. It is understandable that a learner encounters some kind of difficulty because “the rules of combining sounds into words are different in the learner’s native language” (p. xv). The mentioned - above sounds are speech sounds. They can go together to make words which is comprised of syllables. Therefore, that the way to form a syllable in a language is different from one of another language causes many problems for both native speakers from two these countries. For instance, Avery and Ehrlich (1995:60) stated that “In Vietnamese, words are normally of the shape CV or CVC, being composed of a syllable”. However, many English
In a successful communication, anyone taking part in the communication has to understand what their partner speaks. That a speaker mispronounces a word is likely to cause difficulties for other people to comprehend the message he wants to express. Clearly, a proper pronunciation can never inhibit successful communication. Particularly in the context of learning English as a second or foreign language (ESL/EFL), native – like pronunciation surely helps the native people understand what English learners speak. Without doubt, a learner who consistently mispronounces a range of phonemes or inaccurately makes use of suprasegmental elements, such as stress or intonation, has difficulty in understanding and being understood by a native speaker. Consequently, teaching pronunciation plays a paramount role in ESL/ EFL classroom and also an extremely thorny task for all English teachers. In fact, Avery and Ehrlich (1995: xiii) confirmed that in the teaching of pronunciation “biological, socio-cultural, personality, and linguistic factors” should be taken into consideration preliminarily because these factors are known to “affect the acquisition of the sound system of a second language”. Thus, the factors occupy a crucial role because they affect greatly the way a learner acquires a second language. Take the linguistic factor for example. It is understandable that a learner encounters some kind of difficulty because “the rules of combining sounds into words are different in the learner’s native language” (p. xv). The mentioned - above sounds are speech sounds. They can go together to make words which is comprised of syllables. Therefore, that the way to form a syllable in a language is different from one of another language causes many problems for both native speakers from two these countries. For instance, Avery and Ehrlich (1995:60) stated that “In Vietnamese, words are normally of the shape CV or CVC, being composed of a syllable”. However, many English
References: Avery, P. and Ehrlich, S. (1995). Teaching American English Pronunciation Oxford: Oxford University Press. Celce – Murcia, M.; Brinton, D.M.; Goodwin, J.M. (1996) Teaching Pronunciation – A Reference for Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chan, A. Y.W. (2009) Helping Cantonese ESL learners overcome their difficulties in the production and perception of English speech sounds. Hong Kong: City University of Hong Kong Kuiper, K. and Allan, W.S. (1996). An Introduction to English Language – Sound, Word and Sentence. London: MacMillan Press. Loomans, D. and Kolberg, K. (2002). The laughing classroom: Everyone 's Guide to Teaching with Humor and Play. Roach, P. (1998) English Phonetics and Phonology – A practical course Third Edition. Cambridge University Press Thuật, Đoàn Thiện (2009). Tiếng Việt trình độ A tập 1 (tái bản lần 4). Hà Nội: NXB. Thế Giới. Thư, Đinh Lê and Huệ, Nguyễn Văn (1998). Cơ cấu Ngữ âm Tiếng Việt. NXB Giáo Dục. Tươm, Bùi Tất (1997). Giáo trình Cơ Sở Ngôn Ngữ Học và Tiếng Việt. NXB Giáo Dục. [pic]