Teach English in Zhaocheng Zhen - Linfen Shi

Japanese and English are two languages that branch from completely different language families. Due to these dissimilarities, Japanese learners of English often have trouble in the classroom. One common area of difficulty is pronunciation. For a multitude of reasons, pronunciation problems arise in the Japanese EFL classroom. One reason students might have difficulties with English pronunciation concerns the prevalence of English sounds within the monolingual student’s own language. While English includes all of the sounds present in the Japanese language, Japanese lacks many English sounds, such as consonant blends. For example, there is no equivalent for either of the English “th” sounds (/ð,θ/) in Japanese. Furthermore, many English sounds are not phonetic or certain spellings multiple different readings, which adds an additional layer to learning (for example, the two different sounds for “th” or the different ways to pronounce “read”). Japanese students therefore might be more likely to have trouble with these unfamiliar sounds. Students not only have difficulties with sounds that do not exist in their language, but also have trouble with false sound equivalents, i.e. sounds that appear to exist in their language, but in actuality do not. Perhaps one of the most-cited examples of Japanese mispronunciation concerns the English /l/ and /r/ sounds. In Japanese, the most similar sounds are condensed to five characters; ら [ra] り [ri] る [ru] れ [re] and ろ [ro]. While these characters are Romanized using “r,” their sound is equivalent to neither the English /l/ nor /r/ sound. In fact, these Japanese sound is more similar to the English /l/ rather than the /r/. So not only do students have difficulty differentiating between the two sounds, their Romanization adds an additional layer of confusion. Another reason Japanese students may struggle with pronunciation is linked to their system of writing and the way sounds are compounded. A common example of this concerns English words that end in a consonant. Save for ん [n], all Japanese sounds end in a vowel. Therefore, Japanese speakers may have difficulty pronouncing a consonant-final word. For example, a word like “speaker, which ends in “r” and contains a silent “e,” might sound closer to “spīkā.” Similar issues arise with words ending in “t” and “s” being pronounced as “to” or “su,” respectively. While Japanese is not linguistically similar to English, many English words have been adopted into the Japanese language as loan words. However, these English words may lose their original pronunciation as they integrate into the Japanese language. Take, for example, the English word “cheerleader” and the Japanese “チアリーダー.” Romanized, the Japanese would be spelled “chiarīdā,” using characters with sounds [chi] [a] [ri] and [da], respectively. While the Japanese word came from English, the word has been altered to fit the Japanese system of writing and pronunciation. Thus, when trying to teach the English spelling and pronunciation, a student may be more likely to fall back on the Japanese equivalent, rather than the original English. Teaching pronunciation is one of the more difficult challenges in the Japanese EFL classroom. To tackle these difficulties, it may benefit the teacher to break English pronunciation into bits that resemble the Japanese character system. For example, taking a long or difficult word like “unfortunately” and breaking it down as “un-for-chu-net-li.” This process helps the student understand the word in separate pieces and using words and sounds that may be more familiar. Breaking the word into smaller pieces can also aid in practicing cadence and tone by showing where exactly to put the stresses. Overall, it is important for the EFL teacher to learn the differences between English and the student’s native language in order to understand their specific difficulties and how to address them in the classroom.