The Struggle for Multiple Articulations in Pronunciation in Teacher Education

Consonants and vowel phonemes of the English language are produced by means of some articulations. In the field of phonetics and phonology, oral articulations are primarily divided into primary, secondary, and multiple articulations. The impacts of native language, age, exposure, innate phonetic ability, identity and language ego, motivation, and concern for good pronunciation are common effects on the production of pronunciation and intonation. While primary articulation is not problematic for non-native learners of English for pronunciation, secondary articulation, and multiple articulations give hard times to non-natives of English. Especially, multiple articulations contain two or more articulations due to their articulatory strictures that take place simultaneously in different locations of the vocal tract. Double articulations, nasalization, labialization, palatalization, velarization, glottalization, pharyngealization, laryngealization, flapping, and so on can easily take place in the same lexical item. What is meant here by multiple articulations is that if two or three or more of these secondary articulations take place collectively in the same word, their articulation gets to be very problematic and highly challenging for a great majority of non-natives of English in terms of pronunciation. Once again, it must the emphasized that having more than one constriction to narrow the vocal tract at two or more places at the same time is highly frequent in English vocabulary items. That is why this process is called multiple articulations. In this presentation, the causes and effects of the struggle of English learners in the pronunciation of English problem-posing words pertaining to multiple articulations will be demonstrated by means of authentic texts and the voices of native speakers. In the demo, the Audacity sound recording program and text-to-speech labs will also be utilized.