1. What are the suprasegmental features that you would focus on to improve the students pronunciation?

The suprasegmental features that I would focus on are stress and intonation. In stress, I would focus on the word stress and sentence stress. Example of word stress would be photograph photographer photographic; permit permission. Example of sentence stress are We LIVE in an OLD HOUSE. And We LIVE in a deLIGHTful, OLD HOUSE. In intonation, I would teach them the prosody and intonation patterns. I would focus on prosody and intonation patterns. In prosody, Ill teach the students the appropriate length, loudness and pitch when pronouncing. In the intonation pattern, the students would learn about the rising, falling, rise-fall, fall-rise and level intonation.

2. a) Identify three problem sound that Malaysian students would most probably have problem in pronouncing give example of the problem sound.

Malaysian students have a problem in pronouncing long vowels. This is because; there are no long vowels in the Malay language. Thus, every time they have to pronounce long vowels, they will substitute the long vowel into a short vowel. For example, /i:/ as in eel will be pronounced as /i/ as in ill. Another problem is pronouncing / e/ as in the and / / as in father. In the Malay language and the ethnic group languages, there are no such pronunciations. Therefore, Malaysian students just substitute them with /d/ as it is much easier to pronounce /d/. For example, the and father are pronounced de and fader. Besides that, the final consonant is also one of the problems. Unlike English, the Malay language has no final consonants. So, whenever there are words that have final consonants in English, Malaysian students tend to drop them. For example, pump will be pronounced as pum and hold will be pronounced as hol.

b) Select one of the problem sounds you have listed and briefly describe an activity you can carry out to correct the error in pronunciation. Briefly describe the teaching procedures.

The problem sound that I choose is pronouncing long vowels. The activity I can carry out is, listen and repeat. In this activity, I will take 5 minutes to introduce the lesson to the students. Then Ill take 10 minutes to let them listen to me and repeat what I said. Then, I would show them pictures of things that have short and long vowels and make them say the words. This will require 10 minutes. I would take 5 minutes to make them read a passage that has a lot of long vowels out loud. For the last 5 minutes, I would ask them questions to recall back what theyve just learnt.

3. What does teaching pronunciation involves? Teaching pronunciation involves the speech organs and the sounds of English. As a teacher, we need to be able to teach the students how to pronounce properly. To do this, we will have to know the speech organs that are used to produce speech sounds. Most of the organs are in the mouth and the throat. The speech organs that we should know are the palate, Alveolar ridge, lips, blade, teeth, tip, tongue, nasal cavity, velum, velic, uvula, dorsum, pharynx, epiglottis, vocal cords and esophagus. The sound system varies between languages. As an English teacher, it is vital for us to know the sounds of English. We need to be able to compare between the sounds in English and the sounds f the students first language. If teachers are able to understand the differences between languages, they will be able to predict the problems that the students might have and find ways to prevent the problem to occur. Besides that, they will also be able to help students understand a new English sound by using their knowledge of the first language equivalent.