Problems of Phonemic Realization by Students in Selected Secondary Schools in Yenagoa Metropolis

This research focused on the problem of phonemic realization by students in selected secondary schools in Yenagoa metropolis. Specifically, the study identified the influences of student’s mother tongue in the phonemic realization in their academic performance and the concept of phonemics realization. Phoneme are often said to be realized by speech sounds. The different sounds that can realize a particular phoneme are called its allophones. Phoneme means the smallest significant, distinctive and contrastive units of a sound, phonemic realization is the actualization of phonemic sound in the speaker utterance. The researcher’s method was on oral interviews and personal observation and data got were analyzed. The findings show that student should be expose to phonemics as to realize and use them accordingly, Constant teaching of phonemics in classroom should be done thrice in a week for the student, for a better academic performance, that is to say that wrong use of phonemics negatively affects the students’ academic performance. The researcher concludes that most of the students are not properly taught the correct phoneme, despite English is used as the language of instruction and as subject of study in school. This study also adds to the existing literature advocating for a standard pronunciation of English phonemic by its assessment of the classroom to identify a factor for the reproduction of phonemic error.