Analysis of Pronunciation Errors Arabic-speaking ESL Learners in New Mexico
Author: Fatemah Khajah
Publisher:
Published: 2017
Total Pages: 184
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe purpose of this study is to investigate the difficulty that Arabic L1 speakers experience when acquiring the use of the voiceless labial plosive /p/ and the voiced labiodental fricative /v/ in English. This study investigates the differences between phonetic production of the new target sounds and phonemic perception of them. It also takes into consideration such distinctions as onsets vs. codas, and presents the target sounds in isolated words as well as authentic literature passages. Subjects were specifically selected to represent the Gulf Area dialect (such as Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Iraq) because these are the dialects which traditionally have the most resistance to borrowing foreign words with /p/ or /v/. Sixteen native speakers of the Saudi Arabian, Kuwaiti and Iraqi dialects studying in the United States accepted an invitation to participate in this study. A word list and a reading passage were used to test the target sounds in order to generate data for both isolated words (in the case of the listening tasks) and words from authentic literary passages (in the case of the reading tasks). The results of this study strongly suggest that Arabic-speaking ESL leaners are able to learn these sounds as allophones of their homorganic counterparts, /b/ and /f/ respectively, before acquiring them as phonemes. The findings of the study are potentially of great importance to teachers of English as a second language, especially those who deal with monolingual Arabic speakers. Throughout this study I try to come up with various approaches to diagnosing such errors and provide the means to address them pedagogically.