Thesis (MA) - Cyprus International University. Institute of Graduate Studies and Research English Language Teaching Department

Includes bibliography (sheets 44-46)

ABSTRACT This research aimed to determine which initially, medially, and finally occurring consonantal phonemes and which initial and final consonant clusters are the most demanding to articulate for learners of English. The study was carried out with 20 university preparatory school learners in Cyprus. To this end, they were asked to articulate the given 297 words and their voices were recorded and the obtained data in this way were analysed. According to the results of the study, the most demanding phonemes were found to be the phoneme /ð/ occurring initially, medially, and finally in English words; and /θ/ are the most demanding phonemes regardless of their positions in words. The phoneme /θ/ was found disturbing with other phonemes such as /r/ in the case of initial clusters, phoneme /ð/ does not conform at the second final cluster position such as /ðm/, /ðn/, /ðz/. However, the final cluster /z/ causes fundamental issues with the pronunciation such as in /bz/, /dz/, /gz/, /mbz/, /nz/, /ŋz/ with a 100% error ratio for the participants of this study. In order to determine whether there were differences between male and female native speakers of Turkish and French in articulating target phonemes the T-test was used. It was also revealed that there is no statistically significant difference between male and female participants when the articulation of the English consonants and clusters is concerned.