Teaching English Pronunciation to Speakers of Arabic as a Mother Tongue

There is no doubt that all the teachers of English as a foreign language are wondering about an easy way that would enable them teach pronunciation. For me, I think that detecting the areas that may cause difficulties and eases for the students in pronouncing English sounds is an effective way that enables the teachers find the right way to a better pronunciation teaching. Here, in this post, I am providing the findings of a paper that I wrote about the difficulties that may face Arabic students in pronouncing English words and utterances.

The Purpose of the paper was to provide a contrastive study between the Arabic and English sound systems and investigate the extent to which the pronunciation of the mother tongue may influence learning the pronunciation of a second language. Thus, the study is projected in three parts. The first part postulates the contrastive study between the Arabic and English sound systems. It provided a clear distinction between the Arabic and English consonant and vowel systems, underlying the areas of differences and similarities between both. And then, an error analysis study is applied in five Sudanese Arabic learners’ pronunciation for twenty chosen English words. In this post, as I said, I am producing the findings of my paper, that may help all those who teach English pronunciation to speakers of Arabic as a mother tongue.

Regarding the findings projected in the study, it is obvious that the most number of errors committed by the students are approximation errors which are in fact the cause of their mother tongue interference. In the articulation of the word “pupil”, three students tend to pronounce the word with replacing the first [p] with [b]. This is a selection error because the students selected the wrong sound to pronounce the word. It is due to mother tongue interference as in the Arabic sound system there is no /p/ sound, so the

students tried to produce and select a similar sound instead of producing a proper / p / English sound. In the pronunciation of the words “pig” and “big”, this interference can appear clearly, as no student made a mistake in pronouncing the word “big” while four of them pronounced the / b / sound instead of  /p /. The pronunciation of the word problem as well is a good example of this phenomenon.

Approximation errors made by the students because of the mother tongue interference also appears in the students’ pronunciation of vowels. As it is said before, the fact that in English there are more vowels than in that of Arabic, students of English may find difficulties in pronouncing some monophthongs and diphthongs. Some Examples about the mistakes the students made with regard to the pronunciation of vowels is the word “pupil”. The students applied their colloquial Sudanese Arabic pronunciation and that is by replacing the vowel / ə / by / ɪ / which is simpler for them to pronounce and similar to their own Arabic pronunciation.

Words like “star”, and “struggle” are likely to be pronounced wrong by the students, namely because in Arabic there are no consonant clusters. In such words, students seem to add an initial vowel / ɪ /, so they treat the one syllable word “star” as a two syllable word: [ɪs tɑ:r], as well as for the word “struggle.” It is obvious that the fact that Arabic words cannot begin in consonant sounds, so as the students find it difficult to pronounce such words. In the word “text” as well, 4 students tend to pronounce the word with adding a vowel / ɪ / separating the two consonants that compose the consonant cluster.

However, in pronouncing the word “doctor”, as it is used in both English and Arabic language meaning the same thing, students tend again to apply their mother tongue pronunciation. It is also the case in pronouncing the word “alcohol”. These two errors are selection errors. The students selected the wrong sounds to pronounce the words.  They are classified as well as errors due to mother tongue interference. In Sudanese colloquial Arabic the word “garage” is also used meaning the same thing in English. It is pronounced with a final / ʃ / instead of  / Ʒ /. Thus, the students tend to remain the pronunciation as they do in the Sudanese Arabic.

Furthermore, the facts that in Arabic the / r / is always pronounced as a trill makes it respectively difficult to pronounce the silent, rhoticized or non-rhoticized varieties of English. In words like “star”, “understand” and “doctor”, the / r /  is silent, but the students tend to pronoun it clearly. It is an addition error that the students added more sounds. It is also an approximation error because in their mother tongue the / r/ is not silent but a trill.

Another area of difficulty lies in the differences between the consonants and vowels in both languages that there are some consonants which exist in English but no in Arabic and so on. With respect to this fact, students actually found difficulty in pronouncing words containing the consonants: / v /, / dƷ /, / tʃ /, / ŋ /, etc. In table 2.3, the words: “solve, language, champion” are pronounced wrong, because the students try to substitute the unfamiliar sounds with other familiar ones that sound like those in the system of their mother tongue. So, they replaced the / v / with / f / in “solve”, the / dƷ / with / Ʒ / in “language”, and the / tʃ / with / ʃ / as in their pronunciation for “champion”.

Although the study tempted to contrast between both systems in order to find areas of differences that may come up with solutions for the students’ problems in pronouncing the English sounds, but the matter was not about the influence of the standard Arabic, it was about the Sudanese dialect of Arabic spoken by Sudanese students. In pronouncing some English words, it is observed that some pronunciations by the students cannot be justified as mother tongue interference unless this mother tongue is considered as the colloquial Arabic spoken by Sudanese people.  As in so many other cases, in pronouncing the word “what” as [wʌṭ] with the emphatic sound / ṭ /, we cannot admit that it is the standard Arabic pronunciation that influenced the students’ pronunciation of this word. Accurately, as Sudanese people always seem to pronounce the sound / t / as / ṭ /, it is likely clear to assume that it is this spoken variety by Sudanese people that influences the pronunciation, and not likely the standard one.

Nevertheless, not all the errors are classified as approximation errors, some of them turn to be competence and performance errors which are due to unintended mistakes by the students that they would be able to correct, or errors that are not due to the mother tongue interference  but to the students’ own ability to pronounce them. This appears in the students’ pronunciation for the words “adults, what, live, oxford, playing”. The students, in these errors, did not apply their mother tongue in the pronunciation but they produced their own pronunciation that differs from English and have no relation to the Arabic one.

The full version of this paper is available for everyone who is interested in this topic. Just send to khadijam.989@gmail.com and the file will be sent to your mail.

I Hope that I was helpful!  

By: Khadija Muhammad Abdussalam
Teacher in the University of Khartoum
Khartoum, Sudan