Question:
Hyouk-keun Kim called for Korean pronuniciation problems. One thing I
come across from time to time is intrusive ``s'' at the end of words. I
don't think it is a singular/plural problem. Korean has a sound called
a sai-sios that sometimes goes in between words or at the end of words
and is sometimes pronounced [t] and sometimes [s]. ``Internet'' is
pronounced the same in Korean, [intenayt], but if the next sound is a
vowel, [i] for instance, it becomes [intenaysi]. Do Koreans learn
English pronunciations with the sai-sios? I don't know if this is the
reason for the intrusive ``s'' and anyway it is not a big problem
usually. One guy was putting an ``s'' on the end of almost every word
though. The suprasegmentals are the ones people now have to start
working on here.
Answer:
of EFL students' first languages which do not share some grammatical rules
of the target language, such as the "s" ending following English countable
nouns and the pronouns of third person singular "he" (male) and "she"
(female). Such interference has already shaped their cognitive styles of
not recognising the differences between the countable and uncountable
nouns and between male and female in third person singular pronouns.
For example, many EFL students might unconciously mispronounce [shi:] for "he"
and [hi:] for "she" while speaking. Neither do they have great control of not
using the "s" ending to the verbs, such as in "I see, You know etc" or to
the mass nouns; "rice, sugar etc". Therefore, they might mispronounce
"drink" as "drinks" in "I drink" while speaking although they cognitively
know the grammatical rules of subject-verb agreement.
might lead EFL learners to mispronouncing English words, such as the
letter "a". In English, letter "a" is pronounced as [ei] in "day", [ae] in
"cat", and it sounds like as what it is in "garage", "mask", "task" and
"park". When I was at the elementary school in Indonesia, I pronounced
[islaen], but not [ailend] for the word "island" and [gaerej], but not
[gaera:j] for the word "garage". This I think results from arbitrariness of
pronouncing words which might raise EFL learners' difficulties in
pronunciation. Even worse, EFL students might be confused with learning
different but acceptable ways of pronouncing the words "glass", "class"
etc. Thus, first language interference and irregular sound systems of
pronouncing letters in words might elicit problems in pronunciation
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