It will also have a few IPA symbols to represent sounds not present in X and some combined symbols to represent consonant cluster sounds. This phonetic alphabet will employ symbols from X to represent consonant and vowel phonemes common to both X and English. After sorting out these three problems they may use a phonetic alphabet customised to X (XPA) for learning the correct pronunciation of English words. Next, they must learn to pronounce single and consonant cluster sounds in word initial, medial and final, positions in English words. They should learn to distinguish between these sound-pairs by “reconceptualising” the relevant sounds. The second problem is that an NXS may interchange different English sounds and not differentiate between long and short vowel sounds. An NXS English learner has to learn to “conceptualise” these new sounds.
The first problem is that a few sounds, present in English, may be missing in X. If native Speakers of Language X (NXS) can recognise and overcome these problems in learning English then it becomes easy for them to develop an “intelligible” English pronunciation. Non-Native English speakers face specific problems when learning English pronunciation. We believe that BPA can serve as an aid to teaching consistent English pronunciation to Native Bengali Speakers To overcome these problems we designed a Bengali Phonetic Alphabet (BPA) in which we used Bengali characters to represent phonemes common to both English and Bengali, and eight IPA symbols for other English phonemes. It also does not have the very finely differentiated English vowel sounds like, and and does not differentiate between long and short vowel sounds. The Bengali language does not have the fricative sounds, ,, , and and the approximant. Our aim was to investigate the feasibility and ease of use of such a phonetic alphabet to teach English pronunciation to Native Bengali Speakers by combining this visual tool with existing audio tools and techniques. Thus, we can transcribe an English word into a sequence of symbols, with associated sound characteristics, in the order they are to be used to pronounce the word. A phonetic alphabet like IPA can be used to represent different speech sounds or segments, along with some of the suprasegmental characteristics like tone, length and stress, each represented by a unique visual symbol.
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