Pronunciation Teaching Materials on the ʒ Phoneme for Turkish and Indonesian Majors of English

Research Article

Abstract

The perception of a speech sound can substantially change with respect to contextual factors such as neighboring speech sounds, typological factors such as tonal and non-tonal languages. There are also global factors like speaking pace and rate, and characteristics of speakers that include physiology, dialect, memory, and spelling factors. The [ʒ] phoneme is not a common sound in the languages of the world. Indonesian, Finnish, Estonian, Khemer, Icelandic, northern dialects of Welsh, and Hawaiian, Tahitian, and Thai do not have the /ʃ/ and /ʒ/ phonemes in their phonetic inventories. Standard Modern Greek doesn't have /ʃ/ and /ʒ/, either. Japanese and Korean have none of the sounds [ʃ] and [ʒ], phonemically. However, most of these languages may have some allophones of /ʃ/ and /ʒ/ one way or another. For example, loanwords may have introduced /ʃ/ and /ʒ/ to these languages. [ʃ] and [Ʒ] sounds naturally may have taken their places in these languages as echoic words. Similarly, Indonesian doesn't have /ʃ/ (except for loanwords) and, "shhh" is commonly used not only for babies but also for telling people to be silent in general. Since “Teacher Preparation Pronunciation Texts” constitute a crucial issue, the primary aim of this study is to create pronunciation teaching and rehabilitation texts so as to defossilizing the problem-causing phonemes in the education of teacher pronunciation preparation.