Implications of Sound-Letter Ambiguity of English Consonants to Second Language Learners

Abstract

English spelling is not always easy to know what sounds the letters stand for. The study investigates the influence of sound-letter ambiguity of English consonants on some Nigeria undergraduates. Data for the study were gathered using recorded pronunciation exercise. Through a simple random technique, a total of thirty (30) English undergraduates of 2016/2017 session who have studied spoken English and Phonetics and Phonology in their two hundred (200) levels were purposively selected from Madonna University, Nigeria, Okija and Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Awka. The paper anchors on Stephen Corder’s theory of error analysis as its theoretical framework. Using textual analysis, both qualitative and quantitative analysis were employed in analyzing the data. The study reveals that students face a lot of difficulty pronouncing some English consonant sounds, due to lack of one-to-one correspondence between letters and sounds. Again, students are ignorant of the fact that some consonants letters change to vowel sounds in speech and vice-versa. They are ignorant of the phonological conditioning of some plural and past tense markers. Based on these findings, the study recommends that an adequate study drills should be given to the students on the learning of consonant sounds especially on those ones that are non-existent in our indigenous languages.