Swedish Second Language Learners’ Ability to Pronounce English Contrastive Consonant Phonemes

The purpose of this study is to investigate sixth form students’ pronunciation, and their exposure to English during their English lessons in school. The focus of the study is to investigate whether or not the students have problems with pronouncing the contrastive consonant phonemes that do not exist, or are rarely used in the Swedish language (i.e /z/). In order to investigate the students’ pronunciation, questionnaires were handed out, followed by a reading exercise that was recorded. Also, a questionnaire was handed out to the students’ teachers in order to investigate their thoughts about the importance of teaching pronunciation. The participating students and teachers in this essay were chosen from a school in the south-west part of Sweden. The results in this essay show that the majority of the students participating had difficulties pronouncing the English consonant phonemes which do not exist, or are rarely used, in Swedish i.e /z/, /tʃ/ and /dʒ/. Furthermore, the results in this essay show that the students are more likely to pronounce English words with consonant phonemes similar to those used in Swedish