Graduation Thesis ★ June 6

What makes learners believe they will not be able to pronunce English well?

People from some language backgrounds think it is unimaginable for people from their culture to pronunce English well, and this is often reinforced by prejudices and streotypes. Atually I had a streotype that Japanese cannot achieve good English pronunciation compared with Scandinavian and Dutch people. The differences that contrastive studies bring to light between the mother tongue and English will only reinforce this conviction , even in teachers. This can adversely affect divelopment of learners from these countries, even if they come acoss people who provide the contrary. Though there may be some apparently objective reasons for the learners' problems, they don't provide sufficient explanation for the lack of success. Near-similarity can be just as much a problem as great differences. In the end, the most important single factor is the leanrers themselves.

Another common belief, which is sometimes presented as an axiom of psychology, is that after certain age good ponunciatioon of a foreigh language can no longer be achieved. Even junior high school students they sometimes seem to give up to have good speaking skill and pronunciation of English since they started learning English from junior high school and only hope to be able to survive in English tests for entrance examinations. Whatever truth there may be in this, it is also true that many people who start learning a foreigh language after elementary school manage to achieve execellent pronunciation . The problems of those who appear to be incapable of doing so may simply be due to the self-consciousness that comes with ages and not to age itself.

Also junior high school students seems to feel rediculous producing `strange` sounds, or they may feel they look awful. This inhibits them; they avoid speaking and cannot develop a frame of mind that allows them to use their full potential. As the years go by they become convinced that for them `English is simply impossible to pronunce`.

So teachers neet to be up against, prejudice, myth, and belief that all efforts will be hopeless. All these - and there are can be as many different and compounded problems as there are learners - need to be tackled in order to help learners with pronunciation.

Reference:
Laroy, C. (1995). Pronunciation. Oxford English