Common mistakes of Turkish secondary students in pronunciation of English words and possible solutions

This study first gives a summary of phonetics and phonology in language learning and teaching. It also includes a survey of the findings of Turkish-English contrastive phonetics, phonology, and a description of potential sources of difficulties in Turkish secondary students? pronunciation of English.The aim of the study was to find out common mistakes of Turkish secondary students in pronunciation of some English words. It is based mainly on an analysis of phonemic mistakes. Since `a phoneme is any speech sound that is able to cause a change in the meaning of words? (Demirezen : 1986) , allophones, suprasegmentals and other aspects are generally ignored.The study was carried out at Çanakkale Milli Piyango and İbrahim Bodur Anatolian High Schools with a total of 733 students. A list of 65 English words, chosen from the New Bridge to Success English Coursebook being used in both schools for Grade 9th, 10th, 11th and 12th ,and in order to see the pronunciation of the speech sounds in a sentence, two interrogative sentences prepared by the researcher were read by the participants and their voices were recorded using a computer program, Ashampoo Music Studio 3.50. The data collection instruments were a semi-structured questionnaire containing six questions and voice records.Voices of the 733 participants were transcribed using the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). Transcriptions were written with the consideration of Received Pronunciation (RP) of English and Standard Turkish Pronunciation, İstanbul Turkish- established as the official standard language in the Republic of Turkey (Johanson : 2001). To analyze the data percentages and frequencies were used and interpreted using SPSS 10.0 (Statistical Package for the Social Sciences).The results of the study revealed that most of the Turkish secondary students made errors while pronouncing English words. Concerning phonological errors, the findings showed that students made similar errors in their pronunciation of some words and some differences between their pronunciation were identified. Moreover, these pronunciation errors were classified according to their sources and as a result, it was revealed that the students had learnt the pronunciation of English by following their teachers? example mostly.In conclusion, it is expected that this study will contibute as a guide to further studies of English language teaching in Turkey and will help English teachers where to emphasize in teaching pronunciation of English language, which speech sounds are most difficult for the students and what should be done about it.