1.1 Problems of English Sound Articulation
If a foreigner does not pronounce English sounds clearly, a native speaker can hardly understand a word. At the same time, listening to a native speaker, a foreigner may happen not to recognize a spoken word because they themselves used to pronounce it in a different way and what they hear at the moment does not correspond to the acoustic form stored in their minds.
Foreign learners of English sounds run into the following difficulties of pronunciation:
(1) They have to learn to pronounce new sounds, which are absent from their mother tongue, without replacing them by other sounds.
(2) Learners do not always discern the subtle difference between the sound that they hear or produce and the same sound pronounced by a native speaker. They perceive sounds of a new language from the standpoint of their mother tongue. Therefore, it is very important to draw their attention to the similarities and differences in the articulation of similar English and native sounds.
(3) The length of English vowels ( = the amount of time occupied in uttering a vowel) is not a constant but rather a variable quantity. If the time so occupied is short, the vowel is said to be short; otherwise it is said to be long.
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