A Model to Rehabilitate a Fossilized Pronunciation Error of Turkish English Language Teachers: the English Consonant Phoneme /Å‹/ Wrongly Articulated as /Å‹k/ Through Nasal Devoicing

Abstract

Turkish English language teachers have a general affinity to mispronounce the word-final /ng/ sound combination as /Å‹k/ form, but not in an /IÅ‹/ form, which is the right case. This is a typical case of a fossilized pronunciation. The result of the articulation is a bad sounding articulation that gives a serious hardship to the foreign language teacher. It must be borne in mind that bad pronunciation impedes and obscures intelligibility, accuracy, fluency, and automatic control of pronunciation in the target language. The fossilized pronunciation errors keep bothering the communicative fluency of the teacher trainees and novice foreign language teachers who are on the job. Since teaching foreign languages is a vocational job, developing a good intelligible pronunciation skill is an integral part of the profession. In this study, a very common and wrong articulation of /N/ phoneme as /Nk/ by Turkish English teachers will be tried to be rehabilitated by using the audioarticulation model.