Pronunciation challenges faced by Brazilian EFL learners

Abstract

The present study aims to identify the most prominent pronunciation challenges faced by Brazilian learners in a language course affiliated with Universidade Federal do Pará, and discuss which errors seemed to pose the greatest issues for communication. This study proposes to describe the articulation features of English sounds in association with pronunciation, as well as present the importance of teaching the speaking skill with an attention to pronunciation. In order to reach its main objective, it was necessary to gather sufficient data by observing these students during their classes. Furthermore, the study goes on to confirm that the errors presented by the authors Mascherpe (1970), Lessa (1985), Lieff (1993), Nunes (1993) and Baptista (2001), also occur in the group of learners who were the object of this investigation, and the results suggest that the most prominent issues were caused by errors related to stress placement, vowel insertion and consonants. However, the errors which caused the most problems for communication happened on the suprasegmental features of language, which in this case is represented by the category of stress placement.