Abstract

This paper aims to analyse the most common errors produced by a group of speakers of Chilean Spanish, learners of English as a second language, when pronouncing consonant segments. The corpus includes 540 sentences recorded by two groups of students of the Bachelor’s degree in English language and literature at Universidad de Chile. One group is composed by third-year students and the second group is formed by students of fourth (and last) year of the same program. Once the sentences were recorded, the researchers analyzed the deviances in the pronunciation of consonant sounds by contrasting them to the ideal forms established by pronouncing dictionaries of the standard variety of English known as Received Pronunciation. The results show that the most common deviances, in both groups, are those caused by graphemic interference and that the group that committed the biggest number of deviant forms was the one composed by third-year students.