Diagnostic Assessment of an Arabic Speaker - Essay Example

1. Introduction This paper will observe the Arabic speaker’s pronunciation and compare and contrast her pronunciation errors to discover if the mistakes made fit into common pronunciation errors seen by Arabic learners of English. 2. Background of the Interviewee I interviewed Shouq, a 32-year-old from Kuwait. She began learning English at age eighteen. Shouq came to study in the United States in 2011. She spent one year studying the English language. Then in 2013, she started her master’s program in computer science. 3. Errors in Segmental Features 3.1 Problems with English Vowels English has significantly more vowels and diphthongs (22 vowel sounds to 24 consonants) when compared to Arabic, in which there are only eight vowels and diphthongs to 32 consonants. However, the interviewee did not have much trouble with the varying vowel sounds of the passage she read. In one instance, Shouq substituted the /o/ in ‘older’ with the short vowel sound, resulting in the pronunciation of ‘aulder’. Also, the word France was pronounced as ‘Francie,’ most likely because, in Arabic, a vowel at the end of the word calls for a long vowel sound. The big number of vowels in the English language increases the chances of wrongly pronouncing English words by native Arabic speakers whose first language has lesser vowels. As such, some vowels in English and their corresponding sounds might not exist in Arabic. A good example is Shouq’s pronunciation of ‘can’ as ‘cen’. The ‘a’ sound in such a word is not found in Arabic, and anyone who borrows from their Arabic vowels to read English words will make this pronunciation error. Another word that she pronounced wrongly according to this error is ‘hard’ which sounded like ‘hed’. Moreover, the word ‘that’ was pronounced as ‘thet’. 3.2 Problems with Consonants A typical pronunciation error for Arabic speakers of English is the substitution of /b/ for /p/. Letter P is not part of the Arabic alphabet. As I predicted in my contrastive analysis, the interviewee did make quite a few errors in the pronunciation of words containing /p/, including the words “people,” “improving”, “appears”, and “patience”. In each instance, the /p/ was replaced with /b/, whether the P was the initial or medial consonant. Shouq pronounced the word ‘speakers’ as ‘espeaker’, adding the short ‘e’ sound in front of the initial ‘s’ and omitting the final ‘s’ in speakers. It is common for Arabic speakers to omit the addition of an –s suffix for plural nouns because plurals of nouns in Arabic are often formed by internal pattern changes (as with goose - geese in English). Arabic speakers have the problem of replacing ‘t’ with ‘d’ in a word regardless of whether it appears in the middle, start or end of the word. An example is the word ‘native’ that Shouq pronounced as ‘nadive’. This interchanging of ‘t’ and ‘d’ is also evident in the word ‘factor’. Being a native Arabic speaker, Shouq pronounces this word as ‘facdor’, putting a ‘d’ in the place of a ‘t’. An example of such an error occurring at the beginning of a word is with the pronunciation of the word ‘telephone’ which tends to sound like ‘delephone’. This segmental error that is common among native Arabic speakers learning English as a second language is due to the placement of the tongue when pronouncing the words. The Arabic language usually has the tongue towards the front of the palate unlike in English where ‘t’ is pronounced with the tongue pushed a little bit behind (Swan & Smith, 2011). Another segmental error made by Arabic speakers reading through English words is the substitution of ‘c’ with ‘g’ either at the beginning or middle of a word. Shouq had a problem pronouncing the word ‘combination’ as she made it sound like ‘gombination’. This error is found at the beginning of the word. Moreover, the word ‘recognize’ is pronounced as ‘regognize.' In this second case, she replaces the ‘c’ in the middle of the word with a ‘g’. There is also a segmental error in the pronunciation of the ‘f’ among native Arabic speakers learning English as their second language. This sound is replaced by that of ‘v’ as was evident with Shouq. She pronounced the word ‘carefully’ as ‘garevully’. In this word, both ‘c’ and ‘f’ are affected. Another word that she pronounces with this error is ‘information’ that comes out as ‘invormation’. These two words have been affected by ‘f’ being a medial letter. In her pronunciation of the word ‘forget’, she makes it sound like ‘vorget,' which is typical of native Arabic speakers. This word has been affected even with ‘f’ at the start of it. To add to the segmental errors, native Arabic speakers have a problem pronouncing words that have a combination of ‘c’ and ‘h.' This ‘ch’ sound is usually pronounced as ‘j’ by the native Arab speakers who learn English as a second language. I observed the same difficulty in Shouq when it came to pronouncing some words in English. She pronounced ‘change’ as ‘jange’ and at times as ‘shange’. The sound ‘ch’ is strange in Arabic and is hardly used. In fact, it does not exist in Arabic and hence presents the difficulty in pronunciation of English words. 4. Errors in Super-segmental Features Overall, the interviewee did a good job of reading the passage with fluidity in her speech. When reading the question, “Does this mean that accents can’t be changed?” Shouq did not use the appropriate rising intonation to convey a question. Instead, the question sounded more like a statement. In another instance, the reader’s stress of an English expression, “I’m afraid”, came off sounding like the person was frightened, rather than the intended meaning as an expression showing emphasis at the end of a statement. When reading the passage, Shouq omitted the word “a” in a few instances. For example, in reading, “Why is it difficult to speak a foreign language without an accent?” and “…and a strong ambition to sound like a native speaker”, the reader left out the word “a”, resulting in ‘Why is it difficult to speak foreign language without an accent?’ and ‘and strong ambition to sound like the native speaker.’ Shouq failed to stress the appropriate syllable in the word ‘can’t’ and it, therefore, read plainly such that one would fail to feel its negating factor. A listener who does listen to a native Arabic speaker carefully might think that the speaker has said ‘can’ whereas they have said it as ‘can’t’ but without the appropriate stressing. As such, the speaker might misguide the listener into incorrectly misinterpreting the statement in which this word appears. This is a super-segmental error that is highly common among native Arabic speakers learning the English language as the second language. The presence of apostrophes does not necessarily mean the need to stress a syllable in the word. In Arabic, such words are read in full, and Shouq might not have understood that it was the short form of the word ‘cannot.' The same issue applies to words like ‘don’t’ and ‘isn’t’ whenever they appear in a sentence. The learner will not understand the purpose of the apostrophe and might read it in such a manner that it changes the meaning of the sentence. 5. Conclusion It is common for a non-native speaker learning a language as their second language to make errors in pronunciation. These errors can either be segmental or super-segmental, involving vowels, consonants, their combination and the structure of sentences as determined by stress and intonation. To minimize these errors, it is crucial for the learner to practice so as to overcome the accent they attained from their first language (Swan & Smith, 2011). References Swan, M. & Smith, B. (2011). Learner English: A Teachers’ Guide to Interference and Other Problems 2nd Edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN-13: 978-0-521-77939-5 Read More