Orthographic Interference and the Teaching of British Pronunciation to Turkish Learners

Abstract

This article is the report of an investigation of  pronunciation difficulties of Turkish speakers/learners of English which are  due to differences in the sound-letter representations in the orthographies of the two languages, namely called “ortographic interferenceâ€. These difficulties are different in nature than those arising from differences in the sound sysytems of Turkish and English. While Turkish orthography is to a large extent phonemic, i.e. employing a one-to-one letter-sound correspondence (with few exceptions such as  k - kâr- ? - yegane- gavur, etc.), English orthography, on the other hand,  represents 46 sounds of the spoken language with 102 single or group of letters in the written language. Such actual difficulties arising from the differences in the orthographic sound-letter represenatations of Turkish and English are classified, evaluated, and their sources are explained through a detailed phonetic analysis as applied to research methods of “contarstive analysis†and “error analysisâ€, which are effective approaches in the field of Applied Linguistics and Foreign Language Learning. For different categories of difficulties, corrective exercises are recommended for the teaching and learning of  English pronunciation to Turkish students.