15th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-15)

Barcelona, Spain
August 3-9, 2003


Phonemic Perception Training in Teaching English to Pilots

Alexander Panasyuk (1), Irina Panasyuk (1), Andrey Sharonov (2), Liudmila Markina (2)

(1) Saint-Petersburg State University, Russia
(2) Saint-Petersburg Civil Aviation Academy, Russia

A new speech perception training programme for teaching English to Russian pilots and controllers has been introduced based on a thorough phonetic-phonemic investigation of perceptual mistakes in English made by Russian learners of English and on a linguistic analysis of lexical units to be frequently used (both spoken and auditorily perceived ) in their everyday professional communication on international airlines. Special attention is paid to the training of the phonemes which have no equivalents in the Russian language. Two major difficulties in perceiving English speech by native speakers of Russian are tense/lax distinctions in vowels and fortis/lenis distinctions in consonants.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Panasyuk, Alexander / Panasyuk, Irina / Sharonov, Andrey / Markina, Liudmila (2003): "Phonemic perception training in teaching English to pilots", In ICPhS-15, 2849-2852.