In this unit 2, we were to consider the effect of learner's first language on English pronunciation. I chose Hindi as my Language of research as I was born and raised in India and I learned English from formal schooling. I focussed on the areas of interference between Hindi and English, and after doing research, I found that in English, the pronunciation of certain words does not strictly follow the written form whereas Hindi is a phonetic language, the word is pronounced according to its spelling. This leads to the mispronunciation of the English words by Hindi speakers. For example, There’s the silent k of know, knight, and knot but Hindi speaker will say it with K sound.
Also, Hindi speakers sometimes replace /s/ for /z/.For example “House” has /s/ as the final sound whereas “noise” has /z/. They have issues with vowels and thus can not make the difference between “tell” and “tale” or “cot” and “caught”. Consonants clusters at the beginning or end of words are more common in English than Hindi. To exemplify: they pronounce “e-street” for “street” or add in an unstressed vowel, e.g. “filam” for "film".
Another major difference is the standard word order which in Hindi is Subject-Object-Verb as against Subject-Verb-Object in English. During my teaching experience, learners just used to translate the words into English without changing the word order. So, while translating, they might mistakenly say "I(s) football(o) play(v)". The difference between the tone, accent, and pronunciation can be clearly noticed when English is spoken by a Hindi speaker because they use the same phonology and intonation that they use for their own language. So, it is very important that while they learn English, they should learn phonetics and focus on pronunciation.
My "aha" moment in this course was when I read that "the teacher's principal role is to call attention to errors -on the spot or later-as unobtrusively as possible".[Celce-Murcia, M., Brinton, D. M., & Goodwin, J. M. (2008) Teaching pronunciation: A reference for Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages, (pp.352)]. Feedback can be provided in a number of forms, but what is really important, is to ensure that learners hold on to this feedback.
Also, Chapter 13: “Teaching pronunciation” taught me that a teacher should ask the students to work towards an intelligible pronunciation, which means that their pronunciation should be good enough to be understood. This chapter also discussed various techniques and activities to work on student's pronunciation, with the help of which, I also created an activity.
Resources: http://esl.fis.edu/grammar/langdiff/hindi.htm
https://elsaspeak.blog/2016/06/28/10-english-pronounciation-errors-by-hindi-speakers/
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