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2018年

【Original article】

Volleyball or Bareebooru? Common Problems of English
Pronunciation for Japanese Learners
Jackson Koon Yat Lee
Part-time lecturer, Gifu University
Abstract
The purpose of this research is to identify common problems Japanese learners have withEnglish pronunciation. By analyzing a recorded dialogue spoken by two Japanese university
students, the paper highlights problems the speakers have with segmental and suprasegmental
features of English. The paper discusses and explains the pronunciation problems by connecting the
speakers’ mistakes to the pronunciation of the Japanese language. The discussion section of theresearch provides teaching implications on how students would benefit from having a realistic aimof improving their intelligibility instead of a goal of sounding like a “native speaker”, as well assuggestions on how teachers can more effectively utilize their limited class time to focus on
improving intelligibility via pronunciation training to avoid misunderstandings in English
communication.

Key Words: English pronunciation, English speaking, pronunciation instruction, pronunciation
errors, Japanese English learners

1. Introduction
English is a major subject in Japanese education and learners typically have studied thelanguage for at least 8 years by the tie they become university students. While they may be
comfortable with reading and listening, many students lack confidence in their speaking skills andbelieve that they have very weak English pronunciation skills. Through detailed analysis of a82

Volleyball or Bareebooru? Common Problems of English Pronunciation for Japanese Learners

recorded dialogue spoken by two Japanese university students, this research aims to look into
pronunciation problems that Japanese learners often face and discuss them in relation to how theissues affect intelligibility as well as its implications on pronunciation training.
I will first provide some essential background information about English education in Japan.
Using the transcriptions of recorded dialogues based on General American English (attached in the
appendix), I will analyse the speakers’ performance on a segmental level in section 3 and on asuprasegmental level in section 4. Lastly, section 5 will include some suggested implications inteaching English pronunciation for Japanese university students.

2. Background information
To assist in highlighting pronunciation issues Japanese learners face, this section will provide abrief look at English education in Japan, particularly regarding pronunciation learning. It will also
discuss some common pronunciation problems that Japanese learners face, as well as the
background of the two university students who performed the dialogue.
English education in Japan
In Japan, students begin learning English in public schools from 5th grade of elementary school.
By 2020, the introduction of English will start from 3rd grade instead. The lessons focus oncommunication, prioritizing speaking and listening skills. From junior high school and upward,
however, the focus is heavily shifted onto reading and writing, and “teachers spend most of theclass time involved in teacher-fronted grammar explanations, chorus reading, and vocabularypresentations” (Sakui, 2004). From personal observation, I can confirm that oral skills are generally
given very little attention.
Throughout elementary school and high school, English is considered a “team-taught” subject,involving a partnership between a Japanese Teacher of English (JTE) and an Assistant Language
Teacher (ALT), who is typically a native English speaker. While ALTs are hired from various
English-speaking countries, General American English tends to be favoured in Japan, and it is also
the pronunciation this paper is based on. Teaching pronunciation is often considered, by bothstudents and teachers, to be the responsibility of the ALT (Tajino & Walker, 1998). However,
ALTs are expensive, and even in schools where ALTs visit often, the number of English classes
with a JTE and an ALT is fewer than that of classes solo-taught by the JTE, which are usually
exam-focused and grammar-oriented in nature (Sakui, 2004). In addition, the majority of the JTEs
are not fluent in English communication, so aural and oral skills are often ignored when ALTs are
not present (Martin, 2004). Overall, a typical Japanese student goes through at least eight years ofEnglish learning before entering university. However, pronunciation teaching is rather insignificant

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in the grand scheme of English education in Japan. In universities, English is often a mandatory
subject, but what aspects teachers focus on varies. Students may spend a semester focused onliterature for a semester and then academic writing in the next semester, so how muchpronunciation instruction university students receive largely depends on what the teacher chooses
to teach.
Common problems faced by Japanese learners
Japanese learners of English face two major challenges when it comes to acquiring English
pronunciation. One is the sounds used in English that are not found in Japanese, which Japaneselearners (and some teachers) have problems recognizing and producing them. A more in-depth
breakdown of the segmental differences will be provided in later sections when we analyse thedialogue.
Another major challenge that deserves our attention is the “katakana effect” (Martin, 2004).
Katakana is one of the three subsets of Japanese characters that is used to transliterate foreign
words into the Japanese language. It employs the Japanese phonemes and syllable patterns. “Bus”,
for instance, is katakana-ized as basu in Japanese, and “supermarket” is suupaamaaketto. Suchwords are used in the everyday Japanese language, and from my experience, many learners who
find difficulties producing the English pronunciations retreat to reading the English words askatakana instead. The problem affects English pronunciation learning in general, as many
textbooks (and teachers who accept them) in Japan provide katakana-reading to “assist” learners,
and students often memorize English speeches and dialogues in katakana instead (Martin, 2004).
Ironically, the katakana-ized English are often incomprehensible to English speakers. The
widespread and counterintuitive usage of katakana in English learning fossilize Japanese intonationand pronunciation patterns in English (Martin, 2004), and it hinders students heavily on the
suprasegmental level as it attempts to mould many suprasegmental features of English to resemble
Japanese while removing the need for students to acquire the sounds of English.
Profile of the speakers
Both speakers in the recording are 20-year-old, female, Japanese university, second-year
students majoring in physical education. They both went through the standard English education
taught in Japanese public schools without additional English learning experiences such as studying
abroad or attending English conversation schools. They were considered by their English instructor
to be enthusiastic and diligent students. However, they lacked confidence in their speaking skills,
and consider their pronunciations to sound very “Japanese”. They were selected for this study due
to their typical “Japanese English pronunciation”.

84Volleyball or Bareebooru? Common Problems of English Pronunciation for Japanese Learners

The Recorded Dialogue
The two students were asked to read a provided script of a dialogue. The dialogue was of two
friends in a causal conversation, and it contained only words that students of their level would havestudied before. The dialogue also contained various segmental and suprasegmental features of the
English language that could help reflect what the students find challenging. They were given ten
minutes to familiarize themselves with the dialogue and prepare for any uncertain pronunciation
before the recording.

3. Segmental features
This section analyzes the dialogue at the segmental level, focusing on vowels and consonants.
VowelsIn English, there are 20 vowels, including seven short vowels, five long vowels, and eight
diphthongs. We make English vowels with a voiced egressive airstream without any closure or
narrowing of the articulators, and they are differentiated based on the position of our soft palate(raised or lowered), the aperture formed by our lips (neutral, spread, close-rounded or openrounded), and the part of our tongue that is raised and the degree of its raising (Cruttenden, 2008, p.
32).
In contrast, the Japanese language has only five vowel sounds, which are the two front vowel
sounds /i, e/, one central vowel sound /a/, and two back vowel sounds /ɯ, o/ (Vance, 1987). The
English /u/ does not exist in the Japanese sounds, instead, this rounded-lip vowel is often replacedby the Japanese unrounded-lip /ɯ/ in practice. Diphthongs also do not exist in Japanese, and twoconsecutive vowel letters (including long vowels) would often be read as two separate syllables bylower level speakers (Bloch, 1950). As a result, Japanese learners of English have difficulties
producing the vowels that the Japanese vowel system does not contain (Vance, 1987).
In the recording, however, the performers only made a few mispronunciations and they were
not very significant. When speaker A pronounced “journey” in the first sentence, “Did you have agood journey yesterday?”, /ʤɜ:ni:/ was pronounced as /ʤəni:/. The open-mid central unroundedvowel /ɜ:/ cannot be found in the Japanese vowel sounds and it does not have a close equivalentJapanese sound, so we can hear the performer replacing it with /ə/. Another vowel mistake thatcaught my attention was the word “great” when speaker A said “It’s great that we could meet
today.” The vowel of /eɪ/ is a diphthong, and as I have explained above, the Japanese language does
not have any diphthongs, and the vowel /e/ was used in replacement, thus /‘greɪt/ was pronounced
as /‘gret/. The /æ/ in “Thank you” was also pronounced as /e/, changing /θæŋk/ into /‘θeŋk/. Thisinstance speaker B had with /æ/, however, was not an issue with words like “catch” and “happening”

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when spoken by the same person. One last vowel problem I noticed was with the word /mi:t/,where the speaker seems to have replaced the /i:/ with /ɪ/. This issue likely came from the conflict
between the English long vowels being one syllable while the Japanese long vowels constitute as
two syllables, so the speaker who recognized meet being a one-syllable word read it with a shortvowel. Overall, I did not find as many vowel problems with these two speakers as I had expectedwith lower level Japanese learners. While some similar-sounding words may cause confusion whenthe vowels are pronounced incorrectly, , I believe that these issues with vowels alone would notaffect the general intelligibility of the speakers, especially when spoken with the context of theconversation.
Consonants
We will now analyze the performers’ articulation of consonants. In English, there are 24
consonants. They are made by forcing out the airstream to produce the sound, which in contrast to
vowels, can be voiced or voiceless and are differentiated by the differing degree of closure or
narrowing of our articulators (Cruttenden, 2008, p. 26). There are six categories to demonstrate themanner of English consonant articulation: plosive, affricate, fricative, nasal, approximant andlateral (Kelly, 2010).
In Japanese, on the other hand, there are only 14 consonants. Problems often occur when
Japanese learners are faced with the consonants that are not in their native language, such as thefricatives /f, v/ and /θ, ð/, as well as the approximants /w, l, r/ (Lambacher, 1999). Since learners
tend to categorize the English sounds they hear using their native phonemic categories, categories
that are missing in the Japanese sound systems become extra difficult for Japanese learners torecognize and produce (Lambacher, 1999). The abovementioned teaching technique of katakanaizing sounds for students, which ironically hinders their ability in recognizing sounds (Martin,
2004), and the widespread usage of katakana-ized foreign words that are now ingrained in theJapanese everyday language add to the challenges for lower level learners to accept English sounds
without immediately connecting them to their L1 sound systems.
Consonants: /f/ vs./ ɸ/ and /v/ vs. /b/
One of the consonants that Japanese learners have tremendous issues with is the labiodental
fricative /v/. The closest sound in the Japanese is a voiceless bilabial fricative sound /ɸ/, which does
not exist in English. In order to produce the sound, most Japanese learners substitute /ɸ/ for /f/ and/b/ for /v/ (Lambacher, 1999), and this approach to handle the /v/ sound has been commonly
utilized to katakana-ize many foreign words into the Japanese everyday language. “Vanilla” is readas “banilla”, “volleyball” in Japanese is “bareebooru”, and the word “convenient store” is depicted
and shortened as “conbini”, all in attempts to replace the /v/ sound.

86Volleyball or Bareebooru? Common Problems of English Pronunciation for Japanese Learners

In the recording, both speakers displayed issues with all three occurrences of the /v/ sound. In
the sentences “Did you have a good journey yesterday?” and “Tea would be lovely. Thank you.”,read by speaker A and B respectively, both productions of /v/ in the words “have” and “lovely”
were substituted by /b/. The third instance of /v/ in the phrase “it’s not out of my way at all”, the /v/sound in the word “of” was dropped and /əv/ was pronounced as /ə/ instead. It may have been asubconscious elision decision, but either way, the students did not demonstrate any accurate
productions of the labiodental fricative /v/ throughout the dialogue.
Consonants: /w/ vs. /ɰ/Another consonant sound that both speakers had issues with was the approximant /w/. In
multiple cases, both speakers substituted the /w/ sound with the velar approximant /ɰ/, which is acommon substitution used by Japanese learners (Lambacher, 1999). This sound in Japanese isspoken with a slight force on the lips but the lips remain largely unrounded. In the words “one”,“waiting” and “what’s”, the /w/ was replaced with /ɰ/. In the case with the word “would”, bothspeakers dropped the /w/ and pronounced /‘ʊd/ for what should have been /‘wʊd/ (strong form) or/wəd/ (weak form). I attribute this occurrence to the subsequent vowel sound /ʊ/, which has arounded-mouth quality and may have affected the speakers. However, I did not detect the same
issues with the word “we” as both speakers pronounced it accurately with rounded lips.
Other consonants
I would like to group the other consonant findings together, as they did not appear in the
dialogue as often as the /v/ and /w/ sounds as analyzed above. It has been noted that Japaneselearners often pronounce the English sounds /θ/ and /ð/ as /s/ and /z/, as influenced by the Japanesephonetic system (Lambacher, 1999), which we can hear with the words “something” and “the”.
However, I feel that the speakers did not have similar issues with the words “that” and “thank you”,
thus more samples would be required in order for closer examination. Lastly, the consonants /r/ and/l/ are renowned for causing trouble for Japanese learners and has inspired constantly updated
research in improving the /r/ sound of Japanese speakers (see, for example, Aoyama, Flege, Guion,
Akahane-Yamada, & Yamada, 2004; Saito & Munro, 2014). The two sounds are not distinguishedin the Japanese sound system, so learners often use a flap sound that resembles the English /l/ forboth /l/ and /r/ (Lambacher, 1999). Speaker B in particular had trouble when she pronounced “realpleasure” as /lɪəl prəʒə/, confusing the two sounds. However, once again, more samples than theones found in this dialogue would be required for further discussions.
These consonant substitutions have high potential to create misunderstandings, such as when anorder of vanilla ice-cream is mistaken to be banana ice-cream, or when a delicious Japanese riceball is said as a disgusting ball of lice. I had a difficult time comprehending an invitation to play87

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“bareebooru” with my students thinking it was a new game, and when I demonstrated thelabiodental fricative of “volleyball” to the students, they were surprised to visually see thedifferences between the two pronunciations as well as the fact that Japanese people pronounced it
so differently from where the word came from. Considering the potential intelligibility issues, I
believe that consonants require more attention than vowels from teachers when teaching English
pronunciations.

4. Suprasegmental features
This section analyzes the dialogue at the suprasegmental level, focusing on stress and rhythm,
as well as intonation.
Stress and rhythm
In order to contrast the two languages at the suprasegmental level, I believe that it is essential
we first examine the rhythm patterns of the two systems first. English is a stress-timed language,
which means that the rhythm of the language is governed largely by the stressed syllables in thewords and sentences with an equal amount of time taken between any two consecutive stressedsyllables (Cruttenden, 2008). Words can be stressed by increasing loudness, strength, pitch or
vowel quality (Roach, 2000 p.74), while sentence stress is achieved through de-emphasizing words
in the sentence that carry relatively unimportant information, often prepositions, pronouns,
conjunctions, determiners and auxiliaries. The unstressed syllables are made shorter in order toachieve the regular stress interval (Kelly, 2000).
Japanese, on the other hand, is a syllable-timed language where there is no strong pattern ofstress, as syllables maintain their lengths and vowels maintain their quality (Kelly, 2000). This
major difference creates a lot of difficulties for Japanese learners to comprehend and produce theEnglish stress patterns characteristics.
In the recorded dialogue, we can hear the syllable-timed system influencing the learners’
performance. Affected by their native language, both speakers placed equal stress on most of thesyllables in the sentences. For one, function words like “that”, “a” and “can” have weak forms
when unstressed (/ðət/, /ə/, and /kən/, respectively), but the speakers pronounced the words in theirstressed forms (/ðat/, /a/, /kan/, respectively).
The dialogue in general also sounded very mechanical overall with each syllable produced one
at a time. We can hear a few rhythmically connected utterances with phrases, specifically “did you
have a”, “would you” and “thank you”, but experience tells me that these three phrases in particularwere taught and practiced as “connected sets” in junior high school, thus unfamiliar phrases
unfamiliar to them such as “at all” and “catch up” still sounded very disconnected, with each word88Volleyball or Bareebooru? Common Problems of English Pronunciation for Japanese Learners

maintaining its own stress. In fact, most of the words sounded very detached from each other. This
could be due to the unfamiliarity the students had with the dialogue, but nonetheless, both learners
displayed a syllable-timed approach towards reading English aloud, likely influenced by their L1.
Although I do not think this affected heavily the intelligibility of the dialogue, the conversation
would definitely sound unnatural to other English speakers.
Intonation
One more suprasegmental feature I want to discuss is intonation. Intonation is a fundamental
method we express our meanings with rising and falling tones (Kelly, 2000). For example, falling
tones may indicate that the spoken sentence is a statement or information question, while a rising
tone would suggest a yes/no question.
In the recording, both learners displayed very accurate usage of intonation.

All of thestatements were appropriately followed with a falling tone. The two yes/no questions posed byspeaker A were said with a rising tone (despite the word “yesterday” in the first sentence being said
with an unusual word stress), and the speaker also used two rising tones for “tea, coffee…?” tosuggest that it was a list with more options available (such as water, or no drinks). While intonation
can heavily hinder the intelligibility of a speech, both speakers utilized this feature very naturally todemonstrate the meanings of the dialogue.

5. Pedagogical implications
With the already limited opportunities to learn and practice pronunciation in class, it would be
immensely advantageous if the teachers and students have a consensus on the goal that the lessons
are helping the students reach: are students learning pronunciation to sound closer to a native
speaker, or is it to improve their intelligibility? From my own observations, many students in Japan
do in fact practice pronunciation with the dream to “sound like native speakers”. It is a big reason
why so many advertisements of language schools in Japan sell the word “native” over actual
teaching qualities. However, given the differences between the two languages’ sound systems andthe lack of focus on the oral aspects during English lessons, this aim is seemingly unrealistic.
Millions of people in the world, myself included, live in English-speaking countries but still speak
English with a slight accent because of the influences from our other languages. I also believe thatthe disappointment from not reaching this unpractical goal heavily contributes to a lack ofconfidence the learners have, which is a topic for further research.
If the students aim to learn pronunciation to improve their intelligibility and overcome thenoticeable Japanese influence, rather than aiming to sound “native”, they would have a much moreachievable and practical aim for the purpose of communication. It would provide teachers with89

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precise teaching goals that they can prioritize to help students avoid being misunderstood. For
example, teachers can consult Jenkins’ Lingua Franca Core (2007) which provides greatsuggestions on the teaching priorities in regards to improving intelligibility, then they can consider
some issues that Japanese learners have particular issues with and focus on those. On the segmental
level, for example, the differences between /v/ and /b/ and the infamous /r/ and /l/ should beprioritized for Japanese students. Meanwhile, as Jenkins suggests, the /δ/ is not as crucial for
intelligibility. Teachers should also raise students’ awareness for long and short form vowels(Jenkins’, 2007). On the suprasegmental level, while the syllable-timed influence from Japanese
may hinder learners from sounding natural, Jenkins suggests that tonic stress (i.e. stress on the mostimportant word within a group of words) is important to be understood. On the other hand, weakforms, some word stresses, and even the stress-timed pattern are not as crucial for intelligibility.
While the time for university students to learn and practice pronunciation in class is limited,
given that students generally have received little education on English pronunciation means thateven the basics can already open students up to a brand new way to listen to the language. By
focusing on the differences of the languages, students become aware of what might interfere with
their intelligibility as well as more precise priorities on what to improve first. University students
with the goal of intelligibility can then proceed to discovering opportunities outside of theclassroom to experiment with their level of communication skills. With exchange students, English
circles on campus, and even technology such as voice recognition software, students can continue
practicing and improving their pronunciation of their own accord. However, what must come firstis for teachers to make students aware of the language differences and give them a realistic goal.

6. Conclusion
It is clear that the Japanese and English pronunciation systems differ significantly from eachother on both the segmental and the suprasegmental levels, and certain L1 influences that Japaneselearners have experienced may greatly hinder their communicative intelligibility. I believe that it is
crucial for students and teachers to focus on improving learners’ intelligibility via pronunciationteaching, rather than aiming to sound like native speakers. This approach allows teachers toprioritize certain aspects of English pronunciation that Japanese students have difficulties with andmight create potential misunderstandings, while deprioritizing certain aspects that are less likely tointerfere with English communication. This would result in more effective use of the limited
teaching time inherent in the Japanese English education by improving students’ intelligibility and,hopefully, giving them a stronger foundation of confidence in their English speaking.

90Volleyball or Bareebooru? Common Problems of English Pronunciation for Japanese Learners

Bibliography
Aoyama, K., Flege, J., Guion, S., Akahane-Yamada, R., & Yamada, T. (2004) 'Perceived phonetic
dissimilarity and L2 speech learning: the case of Japanese /r/ and English /l/ and /r/', Journalof Phonetics, 32(2), pp. 233-250.
Bloch, B. (1950) 'Studies in Colloquial Japanese IV Phonemics', Language, 26(1), pp. 86-125.
Cruttenden, A. (2008) Gimson's pronunciation of English, 7th edn., London: Hodder Education, an
Hachette UK Company.
Jenkins, J. (2007) English as a Lingua Franca: Attitude and Identity. Spain: Oxford University
Press.
Kelly, G. (2001) How To Teach Pronunciation (Book with Audio CD), London: Pearson ESL.
Lambacher, S. (1999) 'A CALL Tool for Improving Second Language Acquisition of English
Consonants by Japanese Learners', Computer Assisted Language Learning, 12(2), pp. 137156.
Martin, A. (2004) 'The ‘katakana effect’ and teaching English in Japan', English Today 77, 20(1),pp. 50-55.
Roach, P. (2009) English Phonetics and Phonology, 3rd edn., Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Saito, K. & Munro, M. (2014) 'The Early Phase of /ɹ/ Production Development in Adult Japanese
Learners of English', Language and Speech, 57(4), pp. 451-469.
Sakui, K. (2004) 'Wearing two pairs of shoes: language teaching in Japan', ELT Journal, 58(2,April), pp. 155-163.
Tajino, A. & Walker, L. (1998) 'Perspectives on Team Teaching by Students and Teachers:
Exploring Foundations for Team Learning', Language, Culture and Curriculum, 11(1), pp.
113-131.
Vance, T. (1987) An introduction to Japanese phonology, Albany, N.Y: State University of New
York Press.

Appendix
This is a transcription of the dialogue based on GA pronunciation. The original text and its
transcription are in black, and the transcription of the recording is in red.

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A:

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Did you have a good journey yesterday?
[Original]: ‘dɪd jʊ əv ə ‘gʊd ʤɜ:ni: ‘jestə,deɪ||[Recording]: ‘dɪd jʊ əbə ‘gʊd ‘ʤəni: ,jestə‘deɪ||B:

Not too bad, just one short delay waiting in Manchester.
[O]: ‘nɒt tu: ‘bæd| ʤʌst ‘wʌn ʃɔ:t dɪ’leɪ weɪtɪŋ ɪn ‘mæn,ʧestə||[R]: nɒt tu: ‘bæd| ʤʌstə ‘ɰʌn ‘ʃɔ:t dɪ’leɪ ɰeɪtɪŋ ɪn ‘man,ʧesta:||

A:

Good. Would you like something to drink? Tea, coffee …..?
[O]: ‘gʊd|| ‘wʊd jʊ laɪk ‘sʌmθɪŋ tə ‘drɪŋk|| ‘ti:| ‘ka:fi:||[R]: ‘gʊ|| ‘ʊd jʊ laɪk ‘sʌmsɪŋ tʊ ‘drɪŋk|| ‘ti:| ‘kʌfi:||B:

Tea would be lovely. Thank you.
[O]: ‘ti: wəd bi: ‘lʌvli:|| ‘θæŋk jʊ||[R]: ‘ti: ʊd bi: ‘lʌbli:|| ‘θæŋk jʊ||A:

It’s great that we could meet today.
[O]: ɪts ‘greɪt ðət wɪ kəd ‘mi:t tə’deɪ||[R]: ɪts ‘gret ‘ðat ‘wɪ ‘kət ‘mɪ tdeɪ||B:

It’s a real pleasure and it’s not out of my way at all.
[O]: ɪts ə ‘rɪəl pləʒə ən ɪts ‘nɒt aʊt əv maɪ ‘weɪ ət ɔ:l||[R]: ɪts a ‘lɪəl prəʒə ənd ɪts ‘nɒt ‘aʊt ə maɪ ‘ɰeɪ ət ɔ:l||A:

Oh, let me put the kettle on.
[O]: əʊ| ‘let mi: ‘pʊt ðə ‘ketəl ɒn||[R]: ‘əʊ| ‘let ‘mi: ‘pʊt zə ‘ketəl ɒn||B:

Yes, then we can catch up on what’s been happening since last time.

92

Volleyball or Bareebooru? Common Problems of English Pronunciation for Japanese Learners[O]: ‘jes| ðen wi: kən ‘kæʧ ʌp ɒn ‘wɒts bi:n ‘hæpənɪŋ sɪns ‘lɑ:st taɪm||[R]: ‘jes| ðen ‘wi: ‘kan ‘kæʧ | ‘ʌp ɒn | ‘ɰɒts bi:n ‘hæpənɪŋ sɪns ‘lɑ:st taɪm||

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Volleyball または Bareebooru？
日本人学習者に共通する英語発音の誤りジャクソン クーン イェッツ リー
岐阜大学非常勤講師
要旨
本稿では，日本人英語学習者に共通する発音の誤りを指摘することを目的とする。2 人の日本人大学生の発話の録音を用い，対象学生が有する英語の分節，超分節の特徴に関する問題を明らかにした。日本語の発音の影響を関連づけることにより，発音に関する共通の誤りを分析する。考察において「ネイティブスピーカーのように」という目標を設定するのではなく，より現実的で達成可能な相手に伝わりやすい発音を目標として設定することの効果について述べる。そして，限られた授業時間であっても，誤解を避けるための発音練習を集中的に行うことで発音の伝わりやすさを向上できるということを提言する。

キーワード：英語発音，英語スピーキング，発音教育，発音誤り，日本人英語学習者

94