The Perception of English Vowels by Arab EFL Learners: A Case Study of University Students at Zarqa University

Abstract

The present paper focuses on the perception of English vowel sounds by learners of English at university level. English and Arabic, genetically two different languages, share some common features on one hand, and exhibit a lot of differences on the other hand. These differences are the chief source of difficulty in the learning of a foreign language. Some Arabic speakers perform oddly on a range of experimental tasks which involve word discrimination. All these tasks involve discriminating words with identical consonant patterns, but differing in their vowels. Some Arabic speakers, it seems, are conspicuously inaccurate in handling vowels in English words, and are much more prone to make errors involving vowels than subjects of other mother tongue backgrounds. One possible explanation to these effects is that Arabic speakers seem to transfer to English a set of psycholinguistic strategies that are more appropriately deployed in processing Arabic words. Unlike English, Arabic vowels are of secondary importance both in script and in word building, and the word recognition system depends heavily on the tri-consonantal roots which are the basis of most Arabic words with vowels variations placed within the consonantal framework. From pedagogy point of view, such differences between the two languages will be determined and included in various teaching material. In some other words, teaching will be directed at those differences. This in turn determines what the teacher has to teach and what the learner has to learn. The present researchers anticipate that the similarities between the two systems would act as a reference point for the learner's perception of the English vowels. The results of the present research would in turn encourage instructors to follow similar procedures in their teaching of sounds at university level in particular.

Keywords: English as a foreign language (EFL), Modern Standard Arabic, Zarqa University