Q3: Malaysian speakers of English often have problems with the pronunciation

of consonant sounds. Discuss the problem areas and suggest ways to

overcome the problems identified.

OConnor (1988) claims that language starts with the ear. When a baby starts to talk,
he does it by imitating the hearing sounds from his mother. Normal babies are able to
hear and imitate and this gift of imitation and hearing gives them the gift of speech. It
comes to our knowledge that babies at the age of three to seven can learn any
language perfectly. However, most of Malaysians are brought up in a family in which
the mother tongue is learned as native language. In Malaysia, English is taught as
secondary language at school. Hence, the Malaysian English speakers will mother
tongue interference. Some of them may have the problems of pronouncing the
consonants sounds. David H. Deterding & Gloria R. Poedjosoedarmo (1998) says
that there are three ways to describe the consonants sounds which are the manner
of articulation, place of articulation and the force of articulation. From these three
aspects, we can identify the problems of English learners pronunciation of
consonants sounds.

To identify the problem of pronunciation of consonant sounds, I have

interviewed a Chinese English speaker to read a text named Smoke Signals. The
speaker comes from a family whose dialect is Foochow. She has learned English
language since kindergarden. She usually communicate with her family using
Chinese instead of English.

n kul nat lt nli: ba i rn gl v fa, wi rt t ma grndf

z hm z hz dkedz-ld bn bnd t
grand. famn let s stnd

nba z e pmpt wt frm krik kwt mal

we. wi wt bn g p n
flemz, w std memrz v mp f ft-wad wdn bimz nt
he bl. rl sdns kem z ma eldli grndf,
hu dd nt get at v bed, kwatli skt f hz kaz w

sef. hi hdnt hd deri kaz n dzn jz.

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 Firstly, the prevalent problem in pronouncing the consonants sound is dental
fricative substitution. The dental fricatives // and // are often substituted by the
corresponding alveolar stops /t/ and /d/ respectively. For example, the word the is
pronounced as /t/. They pronounce it as voiceless stop /t/ instead of voiceless
fricative / /. Besides, the // sound in the word grandfather is substituted with /d/
and is pronounced as /grndfd/. Chinese English speakers tend to put the
tongue tip at the middle of alveolar ridge while voicing the /th/ sound. As the //
and // sound which are strong and weak consonants respectively are dental sound,
they tend to put the tongue tip at the alveolar ridge which is near the upper teeth.

Furthermore, the substitution of // with // like the word orange is

pronounced as /rn/ instead of /rn/. Most English learner cannot distinguish
between the // and // as both of them are palate-alveolar affricates. The
differences between them is the voicing of articulation in which // is voiced while //
is voiceless. According to Fachun Zhang & Pengpeng Yin (2009), pairs of consonants
in English distinguish itself from the other by being either voiced or voiceless. That is
to say, voiced and voiceless are distinctive features in English. However in Mandarin,
only /sh/ and /r/ is a pair of voiceless and voiced sounds, while a most striking
distinction between the two is /sh/ is aspirated while /r/ is unaspirated. Other pairs
(/p/,/b/;/t/,/d/;/k/,/g/;/z/,/s/) are all voiceless and they only contrast in aspiration.
Hence, the Chinese often neglect the voiced and voiceless sound in English.

In addition, /s/ and/z/ sound are not distinguished properly by most English
learners. They replace /s/ for /z/ so that a word like flames is pronounced
as /flemz/. In conversational situations, the /s/ sound may present two types of
problem. The first problem is that in the spelling of some words, the /s/ sound is
omitted. For example, the word decade is often pronounced as /dked/. The
second problem that many speakers encounter is the redundancy of the /s/ sound.
The /s/ and /z/ sounds do not occur at the final position in Chinese words, but for
English words, they do. Consequently, when speaking, Chinese learners of English
are over aware of these sounds and the over-awareness leads them to make
pronunciation mistakes. They often add the /s/ sound in both adjectives and
uncountable nouns. For example, instead of saying fire, many speakers say fires.

Words-final fricatives is much less frequent in Chinese and results in learners

either failing to produce the consonant or adding an extra vowel at the end of the
word (Paul Shoebottom, 1996). Although most consonants will be difficult to
pronounce at word endings for Chinese, voiced consonants are the most challenging

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ones like /b/ /d/ /z/ /g/ /v/ // /d/ and //. For example, the word night is pronounced
without the /t/ consonant sound and the word ground is pronounced without the /d/
consonant.

To solve the problem of substitution of /t/ for //and /d/ for //, minimal pair
method can be introduced to the speakers to enable them seeing the difference in
the sound. We can get closer to the speakers to see the speakers mouth positions,
and to observe whether they can articulate the sounds correctly or not. For example
sheath (n) /i:/ and sheathe (v) /i:/ is the common voiceless and voiced TH
minimal pair. Besides, for the problem of substitution of // with //, can be solved by
using tongue twisters which are an interesting way to practice and contrast similar
sounds and have fun at the same time. Tongue twister is just like the rhyme of the
lines that uses same sounding consonant brings to the poem. For instance, in the
tongue twister Six thick thistle sticks, one can work on ' sound. The '' sound
is voiceless and is similar to the '' sound which is voiced. The difference between
the two sounds is that the '' does not use the voice. Furthermore, the /s/ and/z/
sound which are not distinguished properly can be curbed if they know the concept of
pronouncing. The plural ending is pronounced as /s/ if stem ends in a voiceless
sound (one of p, t, k, f, ) while the plural ending is /z/ if the stem ends in a voiced
sound. Apart from that, for the problems with word final fricatives, teachers can ask
students to read some popular song lyrics aloud to practice final consonants. In
classes, students often omit final consonants often or pronounce them too lightly to
be heard. For example, they pronounce student as "studen". Therefore, we can ask
them to read the marked song lyrics.

To put in a nutshell, in order to learn English well, learners should pay

attention to the importance of the English pronunciation learning. Mother tongue
interference is usually the main cause of the poor English pronunciation by non-
native speaker. To deal with consonants, one should learn how to distinguish the
sounds in the aspects of describing the consonant sounds so as to achieve the goal
of intelligibility of pronunciation. Intelligibility will make sure that we aim for something
close enough rather than native-like pronunciation. (Joanne Kenworthy, 1992)