Common Sound Difficulties

Common Sound Difficulties for speakers of other languages

Recently I showed my literacy programs at a TasTESOL meeting, to a group of teachers of EAL (English as Another Language) students, previously known as ESL (English as a Second Language). I asked them to write down common sound difficulties – sounds that were difficult to pronounce because they do not occur in their students’ first language, or pairs of sounds that students from different language backgrounds find difficult or confusing. One pair was /j/ and /t/.

Here is the page that I produced to make the difference clear as intuitively as I could and to show how to pronounce similar words with the two sounds. I used jug/dug and badge/bad as pairs of words. I toyed with the idea of using juggle as well as or instead of jug. My grandson had just published a video of himself juggling finger spinners (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XnawFhUGwRI) and I could have used an abbreviated version of it. This would have been much more interesting, but probably not as helpful.

Originally I had only had th/f/v that some native speakers confuse in speech, and also therefore in spelling, (“three” sounds like “free”, “with” sounds like “wiv”) in The Gilead Success with Reading Program, Part 2. I have now added s/th for students who lisp. Also the following common sound difficulties experienced by students from various language backgrounds – s/sh, n/ng, r/l, j/d, b/v, y/j, h/_, i/ee, ch/sh, th/d, th/t, f/p, p/b, v/f.