Helping Turkish EFL Learners with the Pronunciation of Four General British Vowels

Abstract

The paper presents a contrastive analysis of Turkish and English with respect to their vowel systems and orthography. The author then focuses on effective ways to teach four General British (GB) vowels, /i:/, /ɪ/, /ʊ/, and /u:/, to twenty Turkish university students of English as a Foreign Language. The paper presents a practical approach to teaching the perception and production of the four vowels through a set of classroom activities. As practice shows, Turkish students experience difficulties in the recognition and pronunciation of the observed vowels, which can be mitigated using the described activities.

Keywords

• English pronunciation
• vowel system
• orthography
• Turkish
• General British vowels