Which /R/ Are You Using As An English Teacher? Rhotic Or Non-Rhotic?

Abstract

There are many obvious differences between North American English (NAE) and British English (BrE) /r/ phoneme, and a great majority of Turkish English teachers do not know which variant of the /r/ they are using. It must be noted that such a case easily confuses the students. The articulation and production of North American English-r is ambiguous. In terms of articulation and pronunciation, NAE is also referred as General American (GA), and BrE is accepted as Received Pronunciation (RP). The American-r phoneme, whose IPA sign is [x], which is a retroflex case of pronunciation, also called a flap, represents a very serious setback in teaching standard American pronunciation to Turks. As opposed to this, the BrE-r is a tap whose articulation is very close to Turkish-r word-initially and intervocalically.