One of the challenges that teachers can encounter is having to teach students from diverse backgrounds in the same class as this makes the teacher obligated to meet the needs of different language students where differentiated instruction is required. This would not always apply to school classes but private classes, where you could have a mixture of students from different countries.
It is a fact that students’ language variations affect how they perform, and sound patterns of a learner's first language are likely to influence their pronunciation of the target language. This can weaken communication and cause misunderstanding when conversing with others. Chinese students, for example, would pronounce the word “think” as “sink” seeing that the sound “θ” does not exist in Chinese. Therefore, in order to improve ESL students’ English pronunciation, teachers should gain an insight into the different pronunciation variations in order to help them move forward in teaching the English language.
The purpose of this blog is to look at the pronunciation variations facing some ESL students.
