Testing Finnish Schoolchildren's Learning of English Consonants. Jyvaskyla Contrastive Studies, No. 3

The present study deals with two language skills, listening and speaking, and it is limited to single consonant phonemes only. The purpose is to try to find answers to the following problems: (1) Which Finnish consonants are given as substitutes for English consonants by Finnish pupils who have no previous (or practically no previous) knowledge of English? (2) Which English consonants are difficult for Finnish-speaking pupils to learn? (3) Are the areas of difficulty predictable on the basis of a contrastive analysis? (4) Is there a change in the amount and type of learning problems between second formers and fifth formers in secondary school? (5) Can success in the production test be predicted from the listening test results? (6) Are certain background variables related to pupils' ability to discriminate, identify and produce English consonants? The Finnish and English consonant systems are compared on the basis of physical, relational and distributional differences. Substitution, discrimination, sound analogy, written analogy, and production tests were constructed and administered to secondary school students; the total number of subjects involved varied from 48 for the production test to 329 for the discrimination test. The results are given by research question, and sample tests are included in the appendices. (CFM)