The Specification Of The Difficulties In The Perception And Articulation Of The English Schwa Phoneme By Turkish English Teachers And Students

Abstract

The term schwa, comes from Hebrew, where it means 'emptiness' and designates a Hebrew vowel of the same quality (Skander and Burleigh, 2005: 37). The schwa sound, whose symbol is [e] in the IPA system, does not exist in modern standard Turkish Due to this mother tongue interference case, its correct production does not ever correctly take place in the articulation of a great majority of Turkish people because it is not audibly heard. Moreover, when the schwa sound appears in the connected speech, the recognition and production of its phonetic value generally goes unheeded. For example, such words like conclusion, confess, confuse, information, pronunciation, solution, and hundreds of other words are articulated not with a schwa. In addition, due to vowel reduction in English, the shift of all vowels and diphthongs into schwa because of stress shift in vocabulary items makes its recognition and production much more difficult. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.