Abstract:
Pronunciation ability is a crucial developmental skill for learners of English as a second
language. This is because it has a significant impact on the performance of students in
communication situations. Owing to this, it became necessary that the poor
pronunciation abilities among junior high school students of Teberebe M/A basic
school be investigated to ascertain the cause and propose possible measures to
ameliorate the situation. It is against this backdrop that the research was conducted to
ascertain how the orthography of English language contributes to the pronunciation
challenges of the students and suggest measures that can be adopted by English
language teachers in helping the students improve upon their pronunciation skills. The
researcher employed interview of teachers and pronunciation activities of the students
in obtaining the data. Using thematic analysis, the findings showed that the students
articulate letters of the alphabet that are silent in words, and this creates
mispronunciation. For instance, the letters [k] and [p] are articulated in the words knife
and psychology respectively. The qualitative analysis also showed, regarding the
research question two that teachers do not teach sound letter correspondence, and this
makes the learners to lack the knowledge of the various sound-letter correspondences.
The findings revealed that explicit teaching of the correspondence between sounds and
their respective letter would help build the pronunciation skills of the junior high school
students. The study recommended that English language teachers of the junior high
schools should explicitly teach the correspondence between the sounds and the letters
of the alphabet.
Description:
A dissertation in the Department of Applied Linguistics
Faculty of Foreign Languages, submitted to the School of
Graduate Studies in partial fulfilment
of the requirements for the award of the degree of
Master of Education
(TESL)
in the University of Education, Winneba
