Phonetic Errors

Table 1. Possible meanings that can be ambiguous to the listener

Sam’s program requires a good skill of communication in terms of clarity and smoothness in the utterance. So, in order to achieve that, she needs to make good efforts to get rid of above discussed confusion.

Problem Treatment

English teachers for Chinese students should be aware of the confusion between these three approximants /l/, /r/ and /w/. In Sam’s case, I would suggest that she gets trained on the placement of the English /r/ and /l/. First, I would show her the sounds’ manners of articulating the Chinese /l/ and the light and dark English /l/ before articulating the /l/ in the words. Identifying the place of the tongue is very essential. Then, I would list words that end in /l/ sound in a column and list opposite to them another words that might be results of replacing the /l/ with /w/ or other rounded vowels, such as /u:/, /əʊ/ and /aʊ/. See Table 2 below. Later, I can give Sam sentences that have awareness-raising combination of words as in Table 2, and ask her to read whole sentences focusing on the /l/ sound. After enough practice, articulation of English final /l/ should become automatic. The same procedure and exercises can be designed to solve the /r/ sound problem that is discussed above.

Table 2. Shows how the meaning can change if the final /l/ sound is mispronounced and replaced by /w/ sound.

Rhythm

Stressing on the fact that good marketing needs good and effective presentation skills moving to a super-segmental problem, Sam needs to improve the rhythm of her speech. English is a stress-timed language, so their utterances, speakers of English should be careful about when stressing and unstressing the syllables of the sentence. Throughout the discussion we see Sam has a problem in placing and lengthening the stress with single words. To improve her rhythmic speech (now talking about the whole sentence or phrase), she needs a lot of efforts. It is clear that she distributes almost the same amount of stress to most of the verbs. See her utterances:

“English is a course of our daily studies you know ..” [xii]

 “So I think most of us will have a long time – long period to study English”[xiii]

“most of our primary school came from UK”[xiv]

“Oh. It’s a lit bit like complaining”[xv]

Almost all the syllables in these sentences recur at equal intervals of time. In number 4, Sam tends to speak fast, but she unstressed all the syllables and the word complaining was given the same time given to the previous syllables in the sentence!

Problem treatment

I would give Sam a number of sentences first and draw her attention to the content words in the sentence that needs to carry the stress and the function words that should not be stressed, and practice reading the sentence with a smooth flow. I would also suggest that she listens to authentic English as in the news and pay attention to the speaker’s syllable-timed rhythm. She can also listen to some English radio channels on her phone while walking to and fro the university. I should draw her attention to the relation between sentence flow, stressed and unstressed words and the emotions, feelings and focus of the speakers.

To conclude, Sam, being a marketing student at the University of Glasgow, needs to pay more attention on the vowel contrast in English, to the distinction between the /l/, /r/, /w/ approximants in English, and finally to the stress-timed rhythm of English.

[i] 00:03:09

[ii] 00:04:17

[iii] 00:03:16

[iv] 00:01:99

[v] 00:02:38

[vi] 00:03:03  and 00:05:36

[vii] 00:35

[viii] 00:00:58

[ix] 00:05:02

[x] 00:04:09

[xi] 00:06:48

[xii] 00:01:11

[xiii] 00:01:18

[xiv] 00:01:54

[xv] 00: 05:05

Reference

Swan, M. & Smith, B., 1987. Learner English: A teacher’s guide to interference and other problems. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Thornbury, S., 1997. About language: Tasks for teachers of English. New York: Cambridge University Press.