Philippine E-Journals

Common problems with English consonants for Native Thai–Loei and Lao Speakers

Prakorb Phon-ngam

 

Abstract:

Thai- Loei and Lao belong to the Tai language family which also includes Thai, Shan and other dialects spoken by other related ethnic groups in Thailand, Myanmar, Laos, Northern Vietnam and Southern China. Thai –Loei Students in Thailand and Lao students in Loas have been studying English as a foreign language (EFL). As their mother tongues belong to the same language family and their spoken languages are very similar, they always have common difficulties pronouncing English sounds. This paper presents common problems with English consonants for students at Loei Rajabhat University (LRU) in Thailand and National University of Laos (NUOL) in Vientiane, Laos. The subjects were 40 students; 20 from LRU and 20 from NUOL. The research tool was wordlists for investigating pronunciation problems in the word- initial, word-medial and word final position. Approaches in the Articulatory Phonetics and those of Contrastive Analysis were used in data analysis. The study found that Thai students in Loei and Lao students in Vientiane had difficulties in pronouncing English consonants leading to three common different occurrences: phoneme substitution, speech sounds changes, and allophone selection. For phoneme substitution, they shared high ranked common problems in pronouncing 11 English consonant phonemes: /r, ð, Ó¨, äZ, Z, ÔS, S, l, z, s, g/ most of which did not exist in their mother tongue phonological system, only two problematic phonemes /l/ and /s/ really exist in their first language, but problems occurred when these two phonemes appeared as a cluster member and in a final position in English which never been found in Thai Loei and Lao language. The Thai-Loei and Lao learners of English substituted these 11 common problematic phonemes with similar phonemes existing in their native language in every position of the word that these sounds occur. By and large, they always deducted the second cluster members, /Cl-/, and /Cr-/ as /Cø-/. Moreover, they commonly substituted the voiced phonemes with the devoiced one in the final position. For speech sound changes, Thai – Loei and Lao learners of English had difficulty producing the post alveolar approximant [r] which is a lip-rounded consonant, and they mispronounced it as the one with a phonetic feature of lip spreading in the controlled speech, and they mostly replaced it with the lateral [l] in a casual speech. For the allophone selection, the occurrence took place with voiceless stops [p, t, k] which were mispronounced as voiceless stops with aspiration [ph, th, kh] in every position, even these sounds occur after [s-] which native speakers of English pronounced with those allophone without aspiration [sp-, st-, sk-]. In addition, the Thai – Loei and Laos students commonly pronounced the final stops [-p, -t, -k] as the unreleased final [-p˺, -t˺, -k˺].