What sound is hardest to pronoun for an ESOL student?

Answer 1

There isn’t one single hardest sound for all ESOL students, the difficulty depends on their native language. That said, the “th” sounds (/θ/ and /ð/) are often considered the most universally tricky.

Answer 2

This typically depends on the student's native language, but generally a common tricky sound for learners of English is the θ/ð ("th") sound, or a dental fricative. These are hard as they don't show up in many languages, particularly languages they have a large population of people learning English.

Answer 3

The hardest sound to pronounce for an ESOL student depends on the your targeted language. This ability to reproduce an English sound, is contingent upon whether or not the student can hear the different sounds in a word, or if the person can differentiate between two different two letter sounds: For example, Pacific-Rim culture countries have great difficulty "R" and "L," for their language does not have the "R" and "L" sounds. Therefore, the word rice is pronounced as lice in Japan. In Germany, when I taught ESOL, I experienced great difficulty with the word clothes, for native Germans did not have the phone "th" or "theta" in their tool box of language.