TEACHING ENGLISH PHONEMES TO IKWERRE-IGBO L1 SPEAKERS

Abstract

Ikwerre-Igbo L1 students experience difficulties in the pronunciation of English phonemes, which have negatively affected their mastery of English. There is the need to examine these problems, determine the extent of the erroneous pronunciation exhibited by students and provide intervention for them; hence this investigation on Teaching English phonemes to Ikwerre-Igbo L1 speakers. Data were collected from 300 students, 100 each from rural (Elele), suburban (Igwuruta), and urban (Port Harcourt) schools in Rivers State who are Ikwerre-Igbo L1 speakers. Their pronunciation of English phonemes was extracted. Using contrastive analysis (CA), phonemes of Ikwerre dialect of Igbo and English were analyzed and the implications for Ikwerre-Igbo students learning English elaborated, based on the premise of CA that the greater the differences in the phonemes of the languages, the more the difficulties the students would experience. The study discovered that interference of the mother tongue, Ikwerre-Igbo, is the major factor in the pronunciation difficulties of the students. They substitute the unfamiliar English phonemes with some phonemes in their L1. This leads to their erroneous pronunciation of the substituted English phonemes. Another interesting finding is that students in rural area exhibit the most erroneous pronunciation, followed by those in suburban area, and those in urban area, in that order. The study recommends that teachers pay more attention in teaching those sounds of English which are not in Ikwerre-Igbo, such as dental fricatives /θ ð/, palato-alveolar fricatives /ʃ ʒ/, central vowels /ɜ ᴧ ә/ and diphthongs /әʊ ʊә eɪ aɪ ɔɪ ɛә/. Better teaching of the 'difficult' phonemes would eliminate the students' pronunciation errors.