Spanish speakers of English as a Foreing Language current pronunciation errors: The case of /ʃ/ /ʒ/ and /v/

Abstract

The process of learning English as a foreign language can be challenging for some Spanish learners (Carrillo, & Gayoso, 2008) because it involves acquiring and developing new skills including reading, writing, listening and speaking. Nevertheless, in most Spanish schools, English lessons tend to emphasize lexical elements rather than oral production (Chela-Flores, 2008). As a result, pronunciation has become a barrier which hampers the proper understanding and, therefore communication which is the main purpose of a language (Setter, 2008). The present study examines the oral production of eight intermediate English foreign language learners to analyze the problems to pronounce the phonemes /ʃ/ /ʒ/ and /v/ properly. 8 participants took place in this study. They are adolescents and adults whose linguistic level is B2 according to CEFR and have been learning English for more than eight years. Firstly, the stimuli were derived from an audio recording of a native English person reading a short article taken from The New York Times. Then, each participant was recorded reading the same lines. After that, they first listened to themselves, then the original recording in order to establish a comparison of both productions, so that carrying out differences between the two pronunciations. In a face to face interview they were asked about the obstacles they found to produce the phonemes /ʃ/ /ʒ/ and /v/ in the same way they heard them in the original recording. The criteria for assessing the production of the phonemes mentioned previously were based on perception and oral production features which were found in native Spanish speakers.