Pronunciation of English Words with /th/ Sounds among Senior High School Learners

Pronunciation of English Words with /th/ Sounds among Senior High School Learners Jeremiah L. Saavedra Enerdino C. Coronel – Baluno National High School, Baluno, Zamboanga City, Zamboanga del Sur, Philippines jeremiahsaavedra88@gmail.com Abstract ESL learners find pronunciation one of the most challenging aspects in speaking an English language especially if the phonemes of the target language are not present in their mother tongue sound inventory. This study aimed to determine the variation of the pronunciation of English words with dental fricatives or the /th/ sounds among the Chavacano, Tausug, and Visayan senior high school learners. Cross- sectional design and total enumeration was employed in the data collection, and percentage frequency distribution was used for data analysis. Majority of the 32 learner-participants were rated excellent in pronouncing the words with /θ/ sound but poor in pronouncing the words with /ð/ sound. The Tausug and Visayan speakers tend to pronounce the words with voiceless /th/ sound more accurately than the Chavacano speakers, but the latter was better than the other ethnolinguistic counterparts in pronouncing the words with voiced /th/ sound. Mispronunciation of words made by the learner-participants was an affirmation of Richard’s (1974) theory of interlanguage error that signals the negative transfer of phonological elements of the mother tongue into the L2. It can be concluded that the learner- participants needed to practice more in pronouncing the words with fricative consonants to make themselves understood and to avoid miscommunication. 1 Introduction The world’s population is now dominated by approximately 1.5 billion speakers of the English language, either as their lingua franca or as their second language (Lyons, 2021; Szmigiera, 2022). Among the macroskills of language (along with reading, writing, and listening), speaking seems to attract a lot of English learners’ attention. The foundation of speaking constitutes phonetics both in theory and practice that results to good pronunciation, making the communication process more intelligible. Thus, accuracy of pronunciation which is claimed to be the most important element of learning oral skills in a second language should be highly regarded (Pennington, 2019). Nowadays, L2 pronunciation has abruptly evolved as an interdisciplinary field unlike several decades ago when language research and pedagogy related to pronunciation seemed to be insignificant, hence neglected (Derwing & Munro, 2010; Nagle et al., 2019; Tergujeff, 2012). The emergence of research on L2 pronunciation has shed light on issues, theories, and possible solutions on how to effectively improve the pronunciation of learners. In fact, many second language (L2) learners struggle in this aspect especially in making themselves understood or understand others. Haugen (1972, p. 325) defined language ecology as “the study of relationships between a language and the environment, basically identified by the speakers who learn and use it, and transmit to others”. Creese and Martin (2003) supported this ideology by adding that investigation is required to determine the interrelationship of languages in a specific society, the speakers of the language, and the social structures in which the languages are spoken in a society. This means that language learners who have a …

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