Pronunciation of the Past Tense Forms of English Regular Verbs Among Politeknik Sultan Haji Ahmad Shah Students

Abstract

One important aspect of spoken language is „accuracy‟. This is the production of a range of correct and appropriate words and structures as well as correct use of phonological features such as pronunciation, stress, intonation, rhythm et cetera in ESL learning. This study was undertaken to investigate the pronunciation of the past tense forms of verbs ending with „ed‟ in spelling among 30 selected students of Politeknik Sultan Haji Ahmad Shah (POLISAS). Mispronunciation of the „ed‟ sounds of the verbs is one of the common mistakes found among the students. They failed to differentiate /t/, /d/, /ɪd/ and /əd/ sounds of the past tense verbs and become indecisive whether the „ed‟ should be sounded or silenced. This research was based on synthetic phonics approach by Dombey (2009) in which the respondents „build up‟ words, through sounding them out, with one grapheme at a time. After analyzing the learners‟ work, the findings show that all of the respondents were not directly relying on synthetic phonics of L1 in L2 except for the word „wanted‟. This proves that there is no transfer of phonological rules from L1 to L2 in the respondents‟ pronunciation. The results show that respondents have over generalized the rules of pronouncing verbs ending with „ed‟ by silencing /t/, /d/, /ɪd/ and /əd/. However, majority of the respondents were able to pronounce the word “wanted” correctly. The inconsistencies in the results show that the respondents have created a complex set of rules which is imperfect but not similar to the rules of L1. As a conclusion, it can be seen that their lack of understanding of the rules in L2 has impeded their pronunciation. Therefore, in order to help these learners, the lecturer has taken a step to give them more exposure pertaining to this aspect through a remedial class.