International Journal of Language Teaching and Education
Vol. 3 No. 1 (2019): Volume 3, Nomor 1, Juli 2019

Optimality Theory in ESL Phonology: A Practice of Final Consonant Clusters from Vietnamese L1 Speakers

Thong Vi Nguyen (Graduate Institute of Linguistics - National Chung Cheng University)



Article Info

Publish Date
24 Jul 2019

Abstract

The present study aims to adopt the Optimality Theory to investigate the strategies of pronouncing the final consonant clusters in English by a group of Vietnamese L1 speakers. Vietnamese is a language without the final consonant clusters; therefore, Vietnamese ESL learners tend to have different strategies to pronounce those. Seven Vietnamese graduate students were employed to record their word-list out-loud reading. Each of the consonants occurring in their pronunciation production was considered as one token to be analyzed. The result shows that Vietnamese ESL learners employ five different strategies to generate the final consonant clusters. After that, by adopting the Optimality Theory, this study provides both faithfulness constraints and markedness constraints for each strategy with the attempt to generalize the cases of the final consonant pronunciation of Vietnamese speakers. This study is significant for ESL teachers to understand how the Vietnamese language affects the ESL learners’ final sound pronunciation

Copyrights © 2019






Journal Info

Abbrev

IJoLTE

Publisher

Subject

Education Languange, Linguistic, Communication & Media Social Sciences

Description

International Journal of Language Teaching and Education (IjolTe) is an open access published by Universitas Jambi, Master Program of English Language Education, Jambi, Indonesia. IJoLTe receives research-based and conceptual articles on English Language Education, Language Policy, English for ...