When talking about English pronunciation there are many sounds that are unfamiliar to Spanish speakers. One of the most popular problematic vowel sounds is the short, half-close, lax, unrounded monophthong /I/, which has always represented a problem for the Spanish speaker due to its inexistence and its usual interchange for the long, close, tense and unrounded monophthong /i:/. It is the teacher’s responsibility to provide his/her students with the practice necessary to master it. But, are all Spanish speaking teachers capable of producing it well? In this study, we intended to find out if the soon-to-be teachers of English from the Instituto Pedagógico de Caracas were actually capable of doing so. To do this, speech samples were taken. The subjects read a text in which there was a high occurrence of the 2 sounds. These samples were taped and analyzed.
Rodney Perez
