This document discusses, briefly, the importance of preschool language learning and how such learning can be facilitated. In the main, the document sets out three lists for teachers concerning language instruction to preschoolers. List one presents the "age of articulatory efficiency of 23 consonant sounds." Five ages, from 3 to 7 …

Four papers report on phonetic differences between Finnish and English, with pedagogical implications for teaching English as a second language. "The English /ptk/-/bdg/ Distinction: Data and Discussion" by Kari Suomi is a survey of recent work on the phonetic parameters of the fortis/lenis distinction. The distinction…

This booklet, part of a course for teaching English to adult Francophones, is designed to assist the student in learning to produce the "th" sound in English. The voiceless and voiced "th" sounds are described, articulation techniques for both sounds are presented, and listening discrimination and production exercises are provided. A special…

It is well known to anyone involved in teaching English to Finnish students that it is difficult for Finns to distinguish between English /ptk/ and /bdg/. This second volume in a series on a Finnish-English contrastive project reports on a study which attempted to obtain more concrete knowledge about the ability of speakers of Finnish to use the…

Since 1971 the approach adopted in the teaching of English phonetics in Denmark has been a contrastive one. In this paper it is argued that although the original contrastive hypothesis (Lado 1957) has to be modified and weakened, a contrastive approach is highly useful in learning and teaching the pronunciation of a foreign language. Selected…

Very sharp discrimination functions for the timing of voice onset relative to stop release characterize perceptual boundaries between certain pairs of stop consonants for adult speakers of many languages. To explore how these discriminations depend on experience, their development was studied among Kikuyu children, whose native language contains…

This text is designed for native speakers of American English who have a good command of Spanish and want to acquire a knowledge of Portuguese. The manual focuses on features of Portuguese pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary that have similar but not always identical counterparts in Spanish. Correspondences which often create interference for…

This set of color-coded, phonetic diagrams of French vowels, semivowels, and consonants is intended to help students experiencing difficulty in mastering particular phonological features of the language and for use as an audiovisual aid in phonetics classes. Each diagram provides a color-contrasting description of the French sound and the…

This collection of twenty-six papers is the fourth resulting from the Polish-English Contrastive Project. The overall purpose of the project is to prepare a Polish-English contrastive grammar and to develop pedagogical materials. The basic model used for research is the transformational generative one. Among the papers on phonology, topics such as…

The sound system of English is described in all its complexity, from the relationship between spelling and pronunciation to the rules of connected speech, focusing on the methods and rationale of teaching pronunciation of English, particularly to English as a second language learners. (CB)

This study identified two types of interference between Hungarian and English: phonetic and phonological interference. Four native speakers of Hungarian who are second language speakers of English read a passage containing a wide variety of sounds in different phonological environments. A set of rules mapping American English onto…

The present study deals with two language skills, listening and speaking, and it is limited to single consonant phonemes only. The purpose is to try to find answers to the following problems: (1) Which Finnish consonants are given as substitutes for English consonants by Finnish pupils who have no previous (or practically no previous) knowledge of…