บทความทางวิชาการ

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Difficulty in Pronunciation of Certain English Consonant Sounds

Sukarna Chakma

            There were 11 problematic consonant sounds with 2 words for each sound. Each initial consonant sound had 16 occurrences from 16 students and each final sound had also 16 occurrences from the same number of students. There were 22 words and 16 students. So in total, there were 22 X 16 = 352 occurrences of words. Participants had been given the list of words with targeted sounds beforehand and asked to pronounce each word only once. Each student was given 22 words to read having 11 different consonant sounds with 2 words for each sound – initial and final. The consonant sounds of the words were listened and checked by the expert to tick correct and incorrect pronunciation in the boxes while students had pronounced the sounds in the targeted words. 

           The result was based on the number of occurrences of correctly and incorrectly pronounced consonant sounds that were analyzed and then presented by descriptive statistics of frequency and percentage, and also the remarks from the English teacher-expert. It was found that individual English consonant sounds were not problematic for Thai students, however, whenever the sounds occurred in the beginning and end of the words the students had difficulties in pronouncing them and they substituted them with other likely sounds.

*This article was published in Sripatum University Chonburi Journal in 2014.