Arabic speakers’ pronunciation and spelling of English /p/ and /v/

This study aimed to provide a clearer understanding of the phonetic influence a native speaker of Arabic can experience during the acquisition of English as a second language (ESL), specifically for the consonants /p/ and /v/ in spelling and pronunciation. In a small-scale experiment, Arabic speakers of English were asked to translate an Arabic story to English by hand to create an authentic product of their spelling abilities. Afterwards, the same participants read a short story in English, which was recorded with audio equipment to later evaluate their pronunciation through the program PRAAT. Contrary to existing literature, the small-scale experiment conducted for this study found no significant effect for the influence of Arabic on English spelling despite this being hypothesised and proven in previous research. Along with this, no effect was found for the experiment based on the pronunciation of /p/ and /v/. Whereas the results did show that Arabic speakers of English had a...Show moreThis study aimed to provide a clearer understanding of the phonetic influence a native speaker of Arabic can experience during the acquisition of English as a second language (ESL), specifically for the consonants /p/ and /v/ in spelling and pronunciation. In a small-scale experiment, Arabic speakers of English were asked to translate an Arabic story to English by hand to create an authentic product of their spelling abilities. Afterwards, the same participants read a short story in English, which was recorded with audio equipment to later evaluate their pronunciation through the program PRAAT. Contrary to existing literature, the small-scale experiment conducted for this study found no significant effect for the influence of Arabic on English spelling despite this being hypothesised and proven in previous research. Along with this, no effect was found for the experiment based on the pronunciation of /p/ and /v/. Whereas the results did show that Arabic speakers of English had a Voice Onset Time (VOT) of /p/ that was considerably lower, they did not realise a [b] instead of the target [ph] as hypothesised. Speakers did not significantly devoice their /v/ to an [f], which does not directly coincide with the literature that has hypothesised the influence of native language phonology on the pronunciation of English as a second language. When evaluating the results as a whole, two things are implied: (1) there is a possible focus in ESL learning on spelling and therefore no issues were found, and (2) pronunciation is a difficult aspect of ESL learning due to the unfamiliar articulatory processes involved and Arabic learners experience difficulties when faced with the unfamiliar /p/ and to a lesser degree also /v/. However, they are able to make the distinction between the phoneme pairs. These implications may help ESL learners in the future to focus on problem areas, further improve their skills, while simultaneously providing the research niche of phonology with new material to investigate.Show less

Leiden University Student Repository

Documents

In Collections

Arabic speakers’ pronunciation and spelling of English /p/ and /v/