Keywords: combinations of vowels, pronunciation, communication, speech deficiencies.
Kazakhstan accepted trilingual language policy into education – Kazakh – as a native language, Rus-
sian - second language and English - the language of the business, economic and success, so our president
emphasized English as a foreign language, which plays one of the key roles in the development of our
country. Therefore it is not surprising here to start learning and teaching this Worldwide language from
the kindergarten. However, in spite of all these forces made by government on making young generation
trilingual, unfortunately not all of them are proficient in the English language, mostly because of the defi-
ciencies in their speeches. The core of the problem is in the absence of adequate attention and challenges
in the teaching of pronunciation. So, some of the students and teachers who can speak English render
some pronunciations inaccurately. According to Scrivener this is partly because teachers themselves may
feel more uncertain about it than about grammar and lexis, worried that they don’t have enough technical
knowledge to help students appropriately [1, 284]. The reason is that they put priority to know grammar
well and to learn as many words and everyday phrases as possible. They don’t realize the magnitude of this
big mistake in underestimating the importance of pronunciation. The English learners need to recognize
the power of communication. If they want to communicate in English, they need to speak English. Speak-
ing to people is the only way to communicate. The students should know how to pronounce what they
want to say. Everyone knows that how you say something is as important as what you say. It means that
it is necessary for you to acquire standard correct English pronunciation if you would like to understand
English speakers and to be understandable for them.
Standard correct pronunciation implies the following:
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Correct pronunciation of sounds;
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Correct pronunciation of words, with special attention to stress;
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Correct intonation in different types of sentences, which includes correct sentence stress and
rhythm, and correct use of rising and falling tones.
Here taken into consideration mistakes that are made in pronunciation of combinations of vowels. A
vowel combination is a combination of two or three vowels, or of a vowel and at least one consonant that
is associated with one or more specific single sounds. So, spelling and pronunciation are closely related
and should be studied together. This is especially true of English vowel sounds and their representation in
writing. There is a joke in Russia about the English language: “In English, we write Manchester but we
read Liverpool”.
There are six vowel letters in English: A, E, I, O, U, Y. The letter Y represents the vowel sounds [i],
[ai] (mystery, type) and the consonant (semivowel) sound [y] (yes). Together, vowel letters represent from
15 to 22 vowel sounds. The number of English vowel sounds represented by vowel letters and their com-
binations with the other vowels, which means that one and the same vowel letter or letter combination
represents more than one sound. English also has several spelling variants for each vowel sound, which
means that the same vowel sound is represented by different letters and letter combinations in writing. For
instance, below are given examples of combinations of vowels, which represent sound [i:]:
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The vowel combination EE: see, free, agree, knee, feel, feed, proceed, succeed, keen, seek, seem,
screen, deep, greet, sleeve.
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The combination EA: sea, tea, peace, teach, lead, read, peak, deal, reveal, scream, team, clean,
leap, please, release, beat, beneath, breathe, creature, leave.
•
The combination IE in the root: piece, field, achieve, believe, relief, brief, chief, fiend, siege,
shriek, priest.
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