English correct pronunciation: Problems and solutions

Pronunciation is "making sounds of speech the way in which a sound, word or language is articulated, especially in conforming to an accepted standard". But it is often noticed problematic to pronounce correctly when the target language is a second or a foreign language. Everybody is acquainted with a set of sounds of his/her mother tongue. Organs of speech have also been matured up according to his/her language since the birth. So second language or foreign language specially speaking correctly is always a difficult aspect to a greater extent. Both as a learner and a teacher-researcher of EFL, I have had first-hand experience and the opportunity to observe that the Bengali speaking learner confronts difficulty in learning English pronunciation including sounds, stress and intonation related to the phonetic and phonological level. He/she often finds English word formation and sentence construction, respectively concerned with the morphological and syntactic level, quite problematic.

Moreover, the learner faces problems in learning vocabulary items and to convey meanings through and/or receive meanings of words, phrases, clauses, sentences/ utterances, discourse, and so forth related to the semantic and pragmatic level. Such problems obviously seriously retard the learning of EFL by the Bengali speaking learners. Therefore, it seems reasonable to take account of and identify what linguistic problems the Bengali speaking EFL learner encounters and why the consideration and interpretation of the issue in question are completely based on my practical experience as a learner and on my observation as a teacher-researcher of EFL. Finally, a number of suggestions have been made so as to address and lessen the problems, on the one hand, and to ensure the smooth and optimal learning of EFL on the other.

Phonetic and phonological problems
No language exactly matches with another because of phonological differences. Bengali consists of 51 alphabets where as English has only 26 which are 50% of the Bengali sounds. Moreover, English has 44 IPA symbols but Bengali does not have these types of symbols to get correct pronunciations. Since English is a non-phonetic language and there is no one-to-one correspondence between the graphemes (the letters of the alphabet) and the sounds actually produced and realized, at the phonetic and phonological level, the Bengali speaking EFL learner usually faces difficulties in, firstly, 'speech production' encompassing which articulator(s) to use how to pronounce speech sound and how to pattern speech sounds to convey meaning and, secondly, in 'speech perception' covering how to receive speech sound(s) to perceive meaning. It is commonly found in the elementary learner that he/she endeavors to learn pronunciations of words by looking at their spellings, and consequently learns mispronunciations of many of them, for example, adjective, adjustment, future, knee, knowledge, lamb, comb, lieutenant, calm, palm, pneumonia, Psychology, Wednesday, etc. This mainly happens due to faults in teaching, indifference of the teacher to how the learner learns pronunciations of difficult words/expressions and the teacher's lack of training.

Aspirated Consonant Phonemes
Emphatic expressions are very difficult for Bengali speaking people. In English /p, t, k/ are called aspirated sounds as they are typically accompanied by aspiration, especially when initial in a stressed syllable. Examples of aspiration are; part, temper, key. As the Bengali speaking learner is naturally trained to articulate Bengali consonants and as there are a lot of differences between Bengali and English consonants, he/she finds the pronunciations of a number of English consonants difficult in both production and perception. Firstly, while the Bengali language has as many as twenty plosives, the English language possesses six /p b t d k g/. The Bengali speaking learner is used to using both aspirated and unaspirated sounds in his/her mother tongue as it has separate aspirated and unaspirated phonemes producing different meanings. Unlike Bengali, the English language has no corresponding aspirated plosives, and the voiceless plosives /p t k/are aspirated in the initial position of the stressed syllable but unaspirated in other positions. As a result, the Bengali speaking learner cannot exactly pronounce the aspirated allophones of English voiceless plosives /p t k/. Secondly, the Bengali speaking EFL learner cannot exactly articulate and even perceive English inter-dental fricatives since there are no inter-dental fricatives in the Bengali language. Rather, he/she uses Bengali dental stops instead of English inter-dental fricatives. Likewise, he/she generally uses Bengali aspirated bilabial stops /ph/ and /bh/ in place of English labio-dental fricatives /f/ and /v/ respectively because the Bengali language lacks labio-dental fricatives.

Thirdly, the Bengali speaking learner is generally found to pronounce Bengali alveolar retroflex stops in place of English alveolar plosives It /and /d/. This happens owing to the absence of alveolar plosives like English /t /and /d/in his/her first language. Fourthly, the English approximants /w/ and /j / are problematic to the Bengali speaking EFL learner. He/she cannot correctly articulate them as they are not present in his/her first language.

Stress and intonation
Stress and intonation are two essential aspects of the pronunciation of English words and utterances. "Stress means prominence in pronunciation usually resulting from four factors loudness, length, pitch and quality operating individually or in combination". English words in isolation or in connected speech receive stress that results in intonation. Intonation is used to carry information over and above that which is expressed by the words in the utterance. Hence, "English is a stress-timed language possessing a speech rhythm in which the stressed syllables recur at equal intervals of time". On the contrary, the Bengali language is a syllable-timed language having a speech rhythm in which all the syllables recur at equal intervals of time. This difference between the two languages causes many a problem to the Bengali speaking EFL learner. The Bengali speaking learner faces difficulties in the stress placement in English words because, on the one hand, English stress placement varies according to grammatical categories, for example, 'abstract, conduct, contract, contrast, import, incline, insult, perfect, present, produce, rebel, etc1 as verbs receiving stress on the second syllables and as nouns on the first, and on the other, he/she is used to assigning stress almost invariably on the first syllable of every word in his/her first language.

Unlike the Bengali language, the English language has strong and weak forms, such as articles, pronouns, auxiliaries, prepositions, etc which are usually unstressed in connected speech. The Bengali speaking learner can hardly use them appropriately because he/she is not accustomed to the practice in his/her mother tongue.

Over-generalization
Many English words are mispronounced because of over-generalization. As most Bengali speaking people do not get proper formal training for English especially in speaking skill in their primary, secondary and higher secondary levels, their basic knowledge of English are still backward and ineffective. That is why; many of them imitate different common rules of pronunciation while uttering difficult words for e.g. examples, procedure, vision, mission, beautiful, handful. Over-generalization is also noticed from semantic points of view, as many learners mispronounce blessed(adjective) /blest/ in place of/blesid/ like blessed(verb) / blest/ ) and cursed(adjective) / k3:st/ in place of / ko:sid/ like cursed(verb)

Semantic and pragmatic problems
"Pragmatics is the study of the relations between language and context that are basic tone account of language understanding". So contextual meanings are a must to understand one's speech which is very difficult for EFL/ L2 learners to perceive meanings of and to produce meanings by using English words/phrases and utterances/sentences in isolation or with reference to the context of situation often pose serious problems to the Bengali speaking EFL learner since he/she has to mostly depend on his/her mechanical memorization of meanings of isolated words as they are mainly non-contextually and unscientifically designed in the lesson and presented by the teacher in the classroom.

In other words, the learner evidently encounters semantic and pragmatic difficulty in learning vocabulary items and using them for effective communication in the real life situation. In the Bangladeshi classroom, the learner is usually instructed to learn English words/phrases including synonyms, antonyms, hyponyms, homonyms, etc and their meanings mainly through non-contextualized ways, such as memorizing isolated words/phrases and their meanings, translating from the mother tongue to the target language, and vice versa. As a result, his/her stock of words/phrases is very limited, on the one hand, and on the other, he/she cannot effectively and efficiently use even the limited number of words/phrases that he/she retains in his/her day-to-day life communication.

 Bengali is a mixed or heterogeneous language evolved in around 7th Century AD. As a result, many English words entered into it without or partly changing their meanings and these are widely being used in our day to day life. But these terminological words pose difficulties to a greater extent in terms of pronunciation. For examples, Apple is pronounced by a Bengali learner as/ :pel/ in place of /aspl/ table /tebil/ in place of /teibl/. So it is often seen that most of the terminological words are perversely pronounced by many Bengali speaking people, clearly speaking they utter their own-made Banglish pronunciations. This is because of the influence of their mother tongue.

Possible solutions
Our common people might not speak like an educated native speaker with hundred percentage accuracy in pronunciation and in the use of a sound system with its stress, rhythm, intonation, fluency and pause. However, through the foregoing explication, exemplification, analysis and interpretation I have tried my level best to identify the problems of Received Pronunciation (RP) which the Bengali speaking EFL learner encounters especially in phonetic, phonological, morphological, terminological, redundant, semantic and pragmatic aspects. Due to two fundamental causes, we notice difficulties in speaking correctly - one resulting from the differences between the mother tongue and the target language and the other from the teaching process basically constituted of the syllabus, the teacher, the teaching method, material, equipment and testing. To address and lessen the problems, on the one hand, and to ensure the smooth and optimal learning of EFL on the other, proper measures have to be taken to reduce the causes to a substantial extent.

The difficulties created by the differences between the first language and the target language and/or by the mother tongue interference are natural and can be mitigated by only appropriately treating them in the teaching process which explicitly deals with linguistic elements. The learner's needs and wants therefore have a conspicuously direct relation to syllabus construction, the teacher's qualification and training, materials development, use of equipment and the testing instrument as "the learners' needs and wants tremendously control the whole package of teaching materials, aids and equipment and the application of teaching techniques and strategies, the employment of classroom activities and most importantly, the method of teaching and the construction of the syllabus.

Careful listening
Listening being one of the four basic skills of language learning, a habit of listening carefully and not mere hearing the sounds should be instilled into the learners before they pick up a language. Unless one can hear the sound accurately and tell them apart, on cannot hope to reproduce them in correct pattern. This habit demands proper training of the ear for hearing the new sounds correctly. In modern times this may be achieved through the audio-visual aids. However, a regular habit of listening to British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) or Voice Of America (VGA) programs, television programs, taped materials, and watching films will improve one's English pronunciation .Books from standard sources like Oxford and Cambridge University Press are now equipped with both and visual features that help a learner pick up standard pronunciations.

Constant practice
Practice makes a man perfect- goes the proverb. Proper habit of speech is not instilled in to the learners at the early stage. Because of the wrong teaching at the lower levels of study, the learners form incorrect habit in speech and it takes indeed a very hard effort to get rid of the wrong habit already formed. Thus learning and unlearning syndrome affects this group of learners and paves the way for indifference to the subject. A deliberate and determined effort in the form of constant practice may overcome the impediments standing in the way.

Eventually to recapitulate, correct English pronunciation is very difficult especially for EFL/L2 learners because of phonological, semantic, cultural and other differences. To speak the truth, knowledge of pronunciation as well as its application is fundamental to teaching English. But in the context of Bangladesh, the picture takes a different hue. Teaching pronunciation is not only most neglected but also totally absent in the syllabi of teaching English. Hence, first of all our syllabi should be reshuffled giving the importance of correct pronunciation from primary to university levels ,because the world is , now, a global village and here English functions as a global language. So, to get access to the international arena, there is no alternative but to learn English, to master correct pronunciation and to apply it in right time and in right place.


The writer is an independent researcher.