8.2. The areas of pronunciation
8.2.1. Individual sounds
Students of English have great difficulty hearing pronunciation features which
we want them to reproduce. Speakers of different first languages have problems
with different sounds, for example, they cannot distinguish between two sounds or
they do not have certain sounds in their mother tongue e.g. [D] and [q]. Students
are not familiar with sounds like [W], [E], [i], [p] and [q].
There are two ways of dealing with this problem:
we can show students how sounds are made through demonstration, diagrams or explanation.
The other way of presenting its pronunciation is to draw the sounds to their attention every time they appear on a cassette or in the conversation.
This is the way how we can train the students’ ears. Teachers can use the minimal pair system through which students can recognise the difference between two similar sounds.