Teaching interdental fricative speech sounds/T/ and /D/ to university students: an E.S.A. approach

Abstract

Teaching the pronunciation of a foreign language has often meant teaching the students merely to produce the sounds of the language. Pronunciation of a foreign language is, however, a twofold process involving not only the recognition of the sounds but also the actual production of them. The strategy for dealing with individual sounds is by remedial teaching. This can be considered as consisting of two separate approaches Instant Remedial and Planned Remedial (Hubard, , et al,. 1983:209). Instant remedial teaching  will be divided into four parts:  (i)Imitation;  (ii) Demonstration; (iii) Association and (iv)  Explanation. If, after the process of instant remedial work, the 'offending’ sound is still proving difficult, then obviously there is the need for planned remedial work involving twofold process namely Recognition of the sounds and Production of sounds by deploying Engage, Study and Approach (ESA) credited to Harmer (2012). There are two main problems, in the teaching of pronunciation covering linguistic and pedagogical in nature (Abas,1965:78). The linguistic problem involves the analysis and the comparison of the learners’ language and the language to be learned. The pedagogical problem is listing the trouble spots known as linguistic pitfalls and others. Linguistically English and Indonesian belong to two different language families. Needless to say the sound systems of the two languages will differ greatly .and therefore pedagogically the trouble spot lies in two absent interdental fricative speech sounds /T/and /D/ and its adjacent counterpart speech sounds /t/ and /d/ will lead to the positive transfer due to its similarity with the students' mother tongue.