English language learners immensely struggle with making correct sounds of English especially in the beginning levels. It is mainly due to major differences in the phonological system of their native language and English. Consistently, learners of English feel frustrated whenever being misunderstood in authentic situations. So, it is a matter of priority in every ESL classroom as it stands in the way of intelligibility and affects the intrinsic motivation of students. Therefore, the current paper is a systematic and insightful research with twofold objectives. First, it would report and categorize the commonest mistakes of pronunciation frequently made by beginner learners of English. The rationale behind this is to enable teachers of English to anticipate some mistakes and pronunciation shortcomings that students might come up with so as to cater for them before they become fossilized. Secondly, the paper will put forward some practical recommendations that teachers of English and even syllabus designers take into consideration since pronunciation is underrepresented either in classroom instructions or in textbooks. Besides, the paper suggests two Computer-assisted Pronunciation Teaching applications that students can autonomously use to sharpen their pronunciation skills. In the conduction of this study, we adopted a quantitative approach to collect and analyze data. We assigned a focus group of students that we have instructed in a 30- hour course, a speaking test. Accordingly, based on the students’ recordings, we could objectively categorize mistakes and make predictions and generalities about beginner English language learners.

Keywords : Segmental; suprasegmental; intuitive-imitative; analytical-linguistic; integrative; EFL, phoneme, morpheme, minimal-pair.