Journal of Applied Languages and Linguistics

Research Article

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TITLE: Correcting English learners’ suprasegmental errors

Author: Dr Metin Yurtbaşı

Bayburt University, Faculty of Education

English Teacher Training Department,

Bayburt, Turkey

Mailing address: Merkez, Bayburt Üniversitesi Rektörlüğü Bayburt, 69000, Turkey

​Published online: 26 January 2018, pp. 19-26

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​​Citation:

Yurtbaşı, M. (2017). Correcting English learners’ suprasegmental errors in Journal of Applied Languages and Linguistics, 1(1), pp.19-26.

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Abstract

The main cause of pronunciation problems faced by EFL learners in their oral communication is their lack of suprasegmental background (Gilakjani, 2011). Most of those suffering from oral comprehension and expression difficulties do not realize that their difficulty comes from their ignorance or neglect of such concepts as stress, pitch, juncture and linkers. In fact these elements form the prosody and the intonation as the backbone of conveying meaning in a sentence. Such learners not placing stress on the right syllable, those not pausing properly between their utterances and not reflecting in their utterances the emotions their words are loaded thus failing to perform efficient oral communicate justifiably put the blame on their pronunciation teachers who taught them only segmental features and left suprasegmentals unattended. Therefore while correcting such errors, the remedy should come from where the problem was caused and the solution was neglected. As professional phonetics teachers try correcting such students’ suprasegmental errors, emphasis should be given equally on stress, juncture, pitch and other relevant suprasegmentals. Most errors committed by students on the rhythm is stressing every word in the sentence, not reducing the unstressed syllables and function words, not using contractions or unstressing one-syllable content words or pronouncing them too quickly. (Shakhbagova, 2006) While remedying stress problems students should be taught general rules of stress placement emphasizing on primary and secondary stress, using various forms pitch to give emotions in their utterances and taking shorter and longer pauses between meaningful thought chunks through junctures and solidifying such suprasegmentals through constant exercises in dialogues as models by videos. As for junctures students who never pause between words or those pausing inconsistently are drilled on pausing at short or long intervals between “thought groups” in their sentences (Edwards, Harold T., 1997). Thus L2 students can either learn such suprasegmental skills or remedy their fossilized errors and acquire correct habits of articulation leading to expressing more understandable utterances and successful communication. Observers say that natives react more violently to unacceptable suprasegmental errors rather than segmental ones, thus speakers neglecting such important pronunciation elements risk harming their image and the quality of their communication despite all their good intentions. So in order to avoid any misunderstanding, learners of English should consider the good old cliché "It's not what you said, it's how you said it” in mind if they want to have effective communication with their audience.

© Applied Language Studies House Publications 2017. All rights reserved.

Keywords:

Stress placement, primary, secondary stress, prominence, compound/phrasal stress, pitch, juncture, fossilized error, algorithm of suffixes

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