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
- Visual students are the ones who learn
through what they are able to see with their own eyes. 
· Ask for written directions
