EXPLAINING THE ENGLISH CONSONANT SOUNDS TO EFL LEARNERS: MORE ATTENTION ON VOICING DIMENSION

Abstract

To describe English Consonant Sounds (ECS), there are generally three major dimensions to be taken into account. These are Place of Articulation (POA), Manner of Articulation (MOA) and Voicing. The description of Voicing in the summary charts for English consonants raises the problem of its accurate position beside the POA and MOA. This brings about the issue related to which positions Voicing would occupy among the following: i) beside POA; ii) beside MOA; iii) Between POA and MOA (VPM). In order to solve this problem, the current paper aims to pinpoint some features that Voicing commonly shares with POA and MOA. To deal with, 64 tables of presentation of ECS have been selected from websites using the browser ‘Google’. Through a descriptive analysis, the results show that 71% of the presentations do not figure out the voicing dimension in the tables, but they do that in another way; 25% of them show clearly the three dimensions of each ECS and 4% of them present the three dimensions separately. Based on these results, Voicing is, most of the time, granted less attention in teachers’ explanations to EFL learners as if it were worthless. Therefore, it is suggested that the EFL teachers, while describing the ECS, should pay equal attention to voicing dimension during their teaching or in their presentation of ECS in a table