- the difference between /p/ and /b/ will give trouble to Arabic speakers, but not Korean or Spanish speakers.
- Korean and Japanese speakers with have trouble with "th" sounds, but Arabic speakers generally will not.
- some vowels will be easier for one group, but not another
So what do you teach? One thing I've noticed is that sentence stress and rhythm is generally a problem for all learners. So what do we do?
In my experience, it's great to make students aware that English is a stress-timed language, not syllable-timed.
Basically, in English, a sentence becomes longer when there are more stressed words in it. For example, these all take approximately the same time to say:
cows eat green grass quickly
the cows eat the green grass quickly
the cows have eaten the grass quickly
the cows have been eating the grass quickly
the cows could have been eating the grass quickly
You see, it's the important words like nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs that receive stress. The other parts of the sentence, the articles (the), the auxiliary verbs (been, have), modals (could), and verb endings (-ing, -en) are important for grammar but not for the basic meaning of the sentence.
When I show my students this, sometimes they don't believe me, but then I tell them to go out and listen to native speakers talk. They always come back saying, "you're right! That is how they say it!"
If you're learning English, try to pay attention to what people say and how they say it. Listen to what words they stress and what words they don't.
I'd like to also talk about strong vowels and weak vowels in English, which is very closely related to English being stress-timed, but I think that's enough for now.
If you have any questions, please post a comment on this blog post.
Have a good one, and good luck out there!