Teaching Indefinite Articles in English Using Hindi Speech Sounds: A Classroom Action Research

This paper focuses on teaching the use of indefinite articles ‘a’ and ‘an’ appropriately to the students who have had their schooling from Hindi medium schools and are presently pursuing bachelor and diploma courses. It was seen that these students fail to use correct indefinite articles before English words because of the lack of knowledge of consonant and vowel sounds in English language, further to solve this issue a technique was introduced to the students where they could use their prior knowledge of sounds associated to Hindi letters of alphabet. Classroom action research was performed for the fulfillment of the purpose of this research.

Linguistics, which deals with production of speech sounds. Thus, the study of speech sound is known as Phonetics (Sarangi 141). A vowel is a speech sound that is produced with the mouth open, which allows air from the lungs to flow without any significant constriction. The tongue can be at various heights i.e., high, mid or low, within the mouth and at various positions; front, central or back. The lips can be rounded or unrounded to create the correct sound. While a consonant is a speech sound produced by partial or complete blocking of the flow of air using the palate, tongue, teeth and lips.
Every language has vowels and consonants but their numbers may vary. The English language is created through different combinations of 44 sounds out of which 20 are vowels and the rest 24 are consonants. In written language the letters of the alphabet are referred either as vowels or consonants depending on the type of sound they are representing. Written Research Context The problem of lack of knowledge of consonant and vowel sounds in English language was noticed among the students of two different classes. Chart 2 While answering specifically the second category of questions i.e., 1, 5, 7 and 10 similar answering patterns were noticed among both the groups. Chart 1 shows the answer pattern of bachelor students and Chart 2 shows the answer pattern of diploma students. From both the charts it is clear that most of the students got confused between the letters of English alphabet and the way they are pronounced in the word, hence, they failed to use appropriate indefinite articles. The correct answers were as follows: 1. This phone has a unique feature.
2. I met a boy in the store.
3. She was wearing an ugly dress when she met him.
4. Mallorca is an island.
5. Please give me a one-rupee coin.
6. Sara has a new boyfriend.
7. She lives in Europe. She is a European.
8. Can you write a letter? 9. You must eat an apple every day.
10. Sheena is surely an honest girl.  By the time the action research was to be commenced the students knew what are articles and their usage. They understood that written English has 5 vowel letters a, e, i, o and u. Following steps were followed to make the students understand how to imply their knowledge of sounds of Hindi letters:

Research Methodology
Step 1: Taking up a fill in the blank type question in which correct indefinite article is to be used before succeeding word.
Sudha is going to receive ____ award.
Step 2: Notice the word after the blank and pronounce it loudly.
Sudha is going to receive ______ award.
Step 4: Since it is now clear that the word 'award' begins with a vowel sound the students can write article 'an' to fill in the blank.
Sudha is going to receive an award. To test if the above explained technique is helping the students to use indefinite articles 'a' and 'an' correctly, another set of 10 questions was given to the two classes (Set 2).
Following were the fill in the blank questions: 1. It is _____ lovely day.
2. It is ____ auspicious occasion for my family.
5. The speed of this car is 150 miles ___ hour.
6. You will have to go to the hospital for ____ X-ray.
7. My brother is ____ school teacher and my sister is ___ architect.
8. Please call the doctor, its _____ emergency.
In the above set of questions, question 1, 2, 4, 7, 8 and 10 come under the earlier mentioned first category of questions and question 3, 5, 6, and 9 come under the second category of questions.

Result and Discussion
Students of both the classes enthusiastically applied the technique of using prior knowledge of Hindi vowels (स्वर)and consonants(व्यं जन)to use appropriate indefinite articles before English words. They carefully read the given questions one-by-one, loudly