Strategies used by Cantonese speakers in pronouncing English initial consonant clusters: Insights into the interlanguage phonology of Cantonese ESL learners in Hong Kong

Abstract

This article discusses the strategies used by Cantonese ESL learners to cope with their problems in pronouncing English initial consonant clusters. A small-scale research study was carried out with six secondary and six university students in Hong Kong, who were asked to perform four speech tasks: the reading of a word list, the description of a picture list, the reading of three passages, and a conversational interview. The participants' speech was recorded using a high-quality mini-disk recorder and transcribed by two raters. The results of the study showed that deletion and substitution were commonly used by the learners, yet vowel epenthesis was practically non-existent. Certain segments, such as liquids, were also found to be more difficult than other segments in the same onset. It is argued that the findings of the study have both theoretical and pedagogical significance.