Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais

Faculdade de Letras

English Phonology

Professor Andréa Mattos

Isabela Vieira

Karina Brugger

American English Pronunciation for Portuguese Learners: Interdental Fricative Consonants

Belo Horizonte, December 05th of 2013

Summary

1) Introduction

2) Voiced interdental fricative

3) Voiceless interdental fricative

4) The Questionnaire Used on the Research

5) The Results

6) Commenting the Results

7) Conclusion

8) Bibliographic References

1) Introduction

In this paper, we are going to talk about the difficulties Brazilian students have with two

specific sounds of American English, the voiceless interdental fricative [θ] and the

voiced interdental fricative [ð].

Since we don't have these sounds in Brazilian Portuguese, it usually takes time for

students to be able to produce them correctly, some finish the English course without

really knowing how to produce them.

By showing and analyzing the results of our field research, we will talk about the role of

the teacher, what he/she can do to help students, what has been done so far, etc. We will

also discourse about the two sides of the dilemma "is it important to teach phonology?"

Before seeing the characteristics of these sounds, an explanation of the nature of

consonants. According to Martha C. Pennington (1996), consonants are

sounds made with closed or nearly closed articulations. As a consequence,

they tend to break up the stream up speech, defining a perceptual and

articulatory "edge", or margin, for a unit (word or syllable in a word) that

includes one or more vowels. (page 37)

The object of the research is to show the most common mistakes, find out what students

think about the topic and their opinion about what can be done to help them develop the

pronunciation abilities (for those who think it is necessary to develop such abilities).

2) Voiced Interdental Fricative

First it is important to understand the classification of the sounds. It is considered the

place of articulation, that is, the location where an active articulator functions (alone or

with other articulator); the manner of articulation, that is, how the constriction is made

and if it is voiced or voiceless, that is, if there is or not vibration of the vocal cords

during its production.

The [ð] sound is interdental because the tongue is the active articulator. When this

sound is made, the person puts the tongue between his/her teeth; that way, the blade

extends forward the teeth. It is fricative because there is a close approximation of the

airflow and that causes turbulence (= friction). And it is voiced because there is

vibration of the vocal cord when it is produced.

Some words that content this sound are: there, them, than, either, although, weather.

Many students, when trying to produce the word "them", for example, end up saying

[de:r] or [te:r] instead of [ðe:r]. This will be shown deeply in the results of the research.

A technique that teachers might use to help students practicing this sound is to give

them games and tongue twisters, with playful activities they have fun while learning,

therefore will be motivated and relaxed. Of course, this should be done after showing

them how to produce this sound.

3) Voiceless Interdental Fricative

The [θ] sound is very much alike the [ð] sound, the place and manner of articulation are

the same; the only difference is that when produced, there is no vibration of the vocal

cords. Some words that content this sound are: three, thin, bath, thread, depth, fifth,

thank.

Many students, when trying to produce the word "thread", for example, end up saying

[trɛd], [frɛd] or [srɛd] instead of [θrɛd]. When shown where to put the mouth, some of

them put in the right place, but in the moment of the air out, they put it back inside the

mouth or close the lips. A technique teachers can use to stop students from doing this, is

to ask them to pronounce the “F” sound by articulating it with their upper and lower

teeth, and tongue, saying the following sentence: “Fui à feira com o Freitas e o Farias

comer frutas frescas, mas o Freitas preferiu comer fritas.”

The association with Portuguese may help them lose the idea that they are unable to

produce this sound.

4) The Questionnaire used on the research

1. Which are the most difficult words for you to pronounce?

2. Which are the most difficult sounds for you to pronounce?

3. Do you think that learn pronunciation is important in English learning?

4. Do you believe that pronunciation gets better with time?

5. What do you do to improve your oral skills?

6. Do you believe that listen to native speakers pronunciation helps English

learners?

7. How would you pronounce the words: Third, Thank, Think, Brother and Them?

8. What do you think teachers could do to help you in that matter?

5) The Results

Thirty English learners between 11 and 19 years old in different levels of an English

course, all of them go to the same English course at the same place were interviewed

with the questionnaire we elaborated. 6 out 12 of the learners between 11 and 15 years

old presented difficulties to pronounce the words with the voiceless interdental fricative

[θ] and the voiced interdental fricative [ð]. These learners were respectively in the first

and in the last level of the Basic course. 5 out of 18 learners between 16 and 19 years

old presented difficulties to pronounce the same sounds mentioned before. These

learners were respectively in the second and last level of the Intermediate course and

also in the last level of the Advanced course. When asked about the most difficult

sounds for them to pronounce, 11 of the 30 learners answered that the most difficult

sounds for them are [θ] and [ð]. These 11 learners were the same learners who had

difficulties to pronounce the words given in the questionnaire. We also asked in the

questionnaire if they believed that pronunciation becomes better with the time, 19 of the

30 learners said “yes”. 15 of the same learners who said "yes" also said that they noticed

that their own pronunciation became better as they passed to the next level of the

course. The other 4 learners of these 19 that said “yes” also said that their pronunciation

became better, especially because they practice more and more as they passed to the

next level of the course. 26 of the 30 learners believe that learning the correct

pronunciation is very important, 4 of these 30 believe that learning how to pronounce

the words, even in a “wrong” way, but be intelligible, is more important than pronounce

the words in the proper way. 20 of the 30 learners interviewed listen to songs, watch

movies and TV series in English as a tool to improve their oral skills; the other 10

learners said that they do not do anything to improve; they only have contact with

English in the classroom. The 20 learners that use songs, movies and TV series believe

that listening to native speakers helps improving pronunciation. 30 of the 30 learners

interviewed said that the teachers can push the students to pronounce the words

correctly, suggest movies and series to help them improve their oral skills.

6) Commenting the results

The results of our field research showed that most of English learners, especially the

beginners, have difficulties to learn and pronounce properly the two sounds of the

English language that do not exist in Portuguese. During the research we could also

notice that learns also feel uncomfortable, especially in the first time they get in contact

with the words with the voiceless interdental fricative [θ] and the voiced interdental

fricative [ð]. The learners feel uncomfortable when they have to repeat the word

producing the sound. Brazilian speakers are not used to these two sounds and the fact

that to produce these sounds the speaker has to put his/her tongue between their teeth is

strange to most of them. While interviewing the young learners we could notice that

most of them pronounce the word “think” [θɪŋk] as if it was [tɪŋk] or sometimes [tɪnk] ;

the [θ] sound is produced as if it was a [t] sound. According to the interviewed learners,

most of them believe that they will be able to produce these sounds properly if they

practice and also with time, but there are learners from the last Advanced level that still

cannot produce the sound properly, this is more common to happen with Basic learners

who are having their first contact with the sounds, but some Brazilian learners and

speakers apparently cannot produce the sounds properly even with time and practice.

7) Conclusion

We were able to conclude with our field research that the voiceless interdental fricative

[θ] and the voiced interdental fricative [ð] sounds appear to be the most difficult sounds

to be pronounced by Brazilian learners of English. Based on the questionnaire answers

and also on the interview these sounds that do not exist in Portuguese language may

represent a challenge to the learners since they are not used to produce these types of

sounds when they speak their native language. According to the research described in

the article Spanish–English and Portuguese–English interlanguage phonology by Fred

R. Eckman, Spanish learners of English language, especially adults, may also have these

difficulties. On our field research we dealt with teenagers and young adults, so we could

notice that even the youngers may have these kind of difficulties. To interview the

Advanced learns we could notice that the Basic and Intermediate learners may be right

in their belief that with time and practice they will be able to improve their

pronunciation and oral skills. Sounds that really differ from the sounds of the learners’

native language may represent a challenge and may also be a difficulty to most of them.

Another element that we could observe is the students' opinion about the teachers’ role

in the learning process, according to their answers, the teacher should push them to

pronounce the words properly and also suggest movies, songs and TV series proper to

their level of English that may help them get in contact with the language spoken by

native speaker, which may also help them improve their oral skills.

Regarding the importance of learning phonology, the consensus is that, if you just want

to be able to communicate in an intelligible way, you don't need to pronounce

everything perfectly, except in cases where the mispronunciation can cause confusion,

that is, when there are two words with similar sound and different meaning; for

example: "leave" and "live", "beach" and "bitch", and so on.

However, if you are learning English for academic purposes or to have a profession

related to English and its abilities, you need to be proficient in every level, including

pronunciation. Teaching is one good example of that.

With this in mind, we can now raise the awareness of the necessity to come up with

ideas around the importance of phonology teaching and possible changes on the

methods commonly used.

8) Bibliographic References

PENNINGTON, Martha C. Phonology in English Language Teaching. 1st edition. United States of America. Addison Wesley Longman Limited, 1996.

SILVA, Thaïs Cristófaro. Pronúncia do Inglês para falantes do Português Brasileiro. São Paulo. Contexto, 2012.

ECKMAN, Fred R. Spanish-English and Portuguese-English interlanguage phonology. Second Language Research, 2011.

OSBORNE, Denise M. Systematic Differences in Consonant Sounds Between The Interlanguage Phonology of a Brazilian Portuguese Learner of English and Standard American English. Teachers College. Columbia University, 2008.

CELCE-MURCIA, M., BRINTON, D. M. & GOODWIN, J. M. Teaching pronunciation: a reference for teachers of English to speakers of other languages. Cambridge University Press, 1996.