General Problems  Foreign language speakers of a target language cause a great difficulty to native speakers because the sounds they produce seems very peculiar and their voices rise and fall in unexpected places.  It is not enough for students to learn words, grammatical structures, if they are not able to produce proper sounds which make their speech understandable to a native speaker.  Helping students to acquire a stress and intonation which are comprehensible to native speakers is one of the most difficult problems.  Even if you stay in a particular place for several years, you may still have a “foreign accent” that is not easily understood by the native speakers.

Acoustic Phonetics  It is very rare to find two languages with identical sound systems.  Teachers must understand the physical aspects of sound production such as variations of speech organs or in breath control.  Then they will be able to guide their students in correcting faulty sound productions.  Acoustic phonetics studies distinctions in pitch, loudness, timbre, and duration of sounds in different languages and dialects.  Articulatory phonetics deals with the opening or closing of the vocal cords and the nasal passage, various positions of the tongue and lips and determine the differences in vowel systems.

Articulatory Phonetics  Every language teacher should understand the principles of articulatory phonetics in both the native language and the target language.  A “foreign accent” is inevitable if students attempt to produce the sounds of a new language while their mouths shaped or tongues placed as for similar sounds in their native language.