Part 3: Understanding Theory and Issues in the Field Reflection on Research Paper: Common Problems with English Pronunciation

by Norwegian Learners This research paper was developed in AL 6110: English Phonology and the Teaching of Pronunciation, during the fall semester of 2011. The assignment was to identify specific pronunciation problems common for a certain group of English learners. I chose to focus on Norwegians problems with English, since I will be teaching Norwegian students in the future. The paper begins with explaining some aspects of the vowel system Standard Eastern Norwegian (SEN), which is a dialect spoken in the eastern part of Norway. I believed that knowledge about SEN would make it easier to understand why some pronunciation errors occur. According to the Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis some errors can be the result of transfer from a learners first language (Lightbown & Spada, 2006). That means that Norwegians may replace a target English sound with a similar native sound. This dialect was chosen because my sources wrote about it. The paper then gives several examples of errors than could be due to the differences between English and Norwegian.. For instance, the dental fricatives /, / do not exist in SEN, results from studies revealed that they would often be substituted by the sounds /t/ or /d/ by Norwegian learners. Likewise, the North American English vowels /iy, ow, uw, ey/ may often be shortened, in words like please, snow, blue and Wednesday. Writing this paper was a bit challenging for me because it was hard to find sources that directly talked about my topic. Very few had done research specifically on

Norwegians problems with English pronunciation. Instead many research articles talked about Scandinavian problems with English. This means that, Norwegian, Swedish, and Danish were put under the same category. I therefore had to use my knowledge of Norwegian (my first language) to verify if the errors could apply. I believe my paper would have been better if there was actual data to verify the errors predicted by a contrastive analysis. For instance, my source the Speech Accent Archive had only errors from six Norwegian subjects speaking English. Clearly, more research on this topic is needed. I believe I can do some action research on this topic. For instance, in my future teaching I can collect speech samples from my students and analyze them, trying to find errors several students have in common. Another challenge for me was defining the Norwegian vowel system. There were many different variants presented, probably because there are big differences between Norwegian dialects. Most of the sources talked about the Standard Eastern Norwegian (SEN) dialect, so I ended up writing about its system. However, my future workplace will be in the western part of Norway, and the dialect there is very different from SEN. For instance, eastern dialects use the trill /r/, however, western dialects use a uvular /r/ sound. If I do action research on my students, I will have to gain more knowledge about the western dialects phonology, since I believe pronunciation errors relate to the Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis. In conclusion, writing this paper gave me a lot of insights on pronunciation errors that are common for Norwegian learners of English, especially Norwegians with an eastern dialect. I feel more prepared to help students with their pronunciation problems, and I can use this paper to develop future teaching material. In fact, teaching artifact #1,

lesson four, is based on the knowledge I gained from this paper. Here I created activities that would help students identify and distinguish between problematic sounds, like the dental fricatives /, /. Furthermore, it made me more aware of how language errors typically relate to the learners first language. And finally, writing this paper gave me ideas on how I can do my own research on this topic in the future. References Lightbrown, P.M., & Spada, N. (2006). How Languages are Learned (3rd ed.). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.