The pronunciation of the sounds /w/, /dʒ/ and /tʃ/ tends to cause difficulties among students with Swedish as their mother tongue (Stubelius 1968:73ff). This research aims to investigate the situations in which these specific sounds contribute to intelligibility problems, whether the teachers are aware of those intelligibility problems and, if they are, how they approach them. 30 students participated in the study, with the addition of three of their teachers answering questionnaires. Of the three teachers, Teacher 1 taught Group 1, Teacher 2 taught Group 2 and Teacher 3 taught Group 3.
The results show that the sound /w/ was only mispronounced 0.2% of the time (see Table 4). The majority of mispronunciation for the sounds /dʒ/ and /tʃ/ occurred at the beginning of words, with 85% and 79% respectively (see Table 8 and 12). Moreover, the errors appear mostly in the same words, "just" and "choose" (70% and 42.42%: see Table 20 and 22). Former studies support the fact that the pronunciation of /dʒ/ and /tʃ/ cause problems for Swedes (Stubelius 1968:90). Nevertheless, previous research also claims Swedes often exchange /w/ with /v/ whereas the students in this study did not have such problems (Stubelius 1968:97).
The students in Group 3 replace /dʒ/ with /ʃ/, /tʃ/and /dj/ and replace /t ʃ/ with /ts/ and /ʃ/. The mentioned errors did not occur in the other two groups.