Questão de Inglês — Adjetivos | Adjectives — CESPE / CEBRASPE 2021

    General observation suggests that it is those who start to learn English after their school years who are most likely to have serious difficulties in acquiring intelligible pronunciation, with the degree of difficulty increasing markedly with age. This difficulty has nothing to do with intelligence or level of education, or even with knowledge of English grammar and vocabulary.

    Of course, there is no simple answer to why pronunciation is so difficult to learn — indeed, there is a whole range of theoretical perspectives on the question. What is generally accepted among psycholinguists and phonologists who specialized in this area is that the difficulty in learning to pronounce a foreign language is cognitive rather than physical, and that it has something to do with the way “raw sound” is categorized or conceptualized in using speech.

    Many learners of English as a second language have major difficulties with English pronunciation even after years of learning the language. This often results in them facing difficulties in areas such as finding employment. Up to a certain proficiency standard, the fault which most severely impairs the communication process in EFL/ESL learners is pronunciation, not vocabulary or grammar.