This data visualization is a part of my Master’s Thesis—Visual Designs to Improve Pronunciation for Thais Who Speak English as a Second Language. The research was conducted by interviewing five Thai participants. The data were evaluated by two ESL instructors.
Task 01: Five-word represent Tinglish pronunciation (Click to Play the Audio File)
Football: Thai always use the ‘N’ to replace the ‘L’ sound.
Strong: Three consecutive consonants will be assigned a vowel to the first consonant.
Stove/mouse: Thai usually drop final consonant sounds.
Internet: Thai intonations are applied to English pronunciations especially, words that are borrowed from English.
RTGS stands for Royal Thai General System of transcription. This is the official system of rendering Thai words, letters, and vowels into the Latin alphabet. For this project, I focus on six commonly mispronounced letters which are ‘R’, ‘L’, ‘V’, ‘W’, /tʃ/, and /ʃ/
The task helped me to understand the difficulty of the six common mispronounced consonant sounds which are ‘R’, ‘L’, ‘V’, ‘W’, /tʃ/, and /ʃ/
This task helps evaluate 12 words that contain six mispronounced consonants. Oftentimes, these words could interchangeably pronounce by Thais and they are somewhat difficult to understand by English native speakers.
Thai language does not have a Thai standardized representation of sounds like English which is IPA (The International Phonetic Alphabet.) This causes a significant problem when English words are written in Thai as a pronunciation guideline for Thais to recite. Every English-Thai dictionary has its own takes to provide guidelines for pronunciation. This task compares five English words paired up with Thai pronunciation guides from two different dictionaries.
Click Here to Listen to the Pronunciation Tasks from Participants