The current study examines the perception of the British English (BE) vowels by Yemeni EFL undergraduate learners. Specifically, all the BE vowels (except schwa) were investigated to explore the most misperceived English vowels by 67 EFL learners at different proficiency levels- beginners, intermediate and advanced. A perception test, which measured the learners’ perception of the of BE vowels, and a questionnaire, which mainly measured participants’ level of difficulty they experience in perceiving these English sounds, were used to collect data from the learners. Overall, the results revealed that the vowels of BE present a serious problem to Yemeni EFL learners as they could not identify these non-native speech sounds with high rates of correct perceptions. More specifically, it was found that lower- and higher-level learners showed similar misperception patterns of the BE vowels whereby they had the greatest difficulty in perceiving /eə, / æ/, /e /, / ɒ /, and /ʌ. Generally, in addition to the learning context, the teaching aids and the perceptual training, the misperceptions of BE vowels might also be due to the closeness and similarity existing among these English vowel segments.

The present study investigated the production of British English (BrE) vowels by Yemeni-Arabic learners of English. Specifically, the most problematic BrE vowels for those learners were explored in relation to Lados’ (1957) contrastive analysis hypothesis (CAH) and Flege’s (1995) Speech Learning Model (SLM). Sixty-seven Yemeni EFL learners at different proficiency levels completed a questionnaire, which mainly explored how difficult the BrE vowels are for them, and a vowel production test, which measured the learners’ production accuracy of the BrE vowels. Overall, the results revealed that Yemeni EFL learners encountered some difficulties when pronouncing BrE vowels, but their production accuracy rates increased as their levels grow. It was found that the same vowels, /e/, /ɒ/, /eə/, /ɔ:/, /ʊ/ & /u:/, were found to be the most inaccurately produced sounds by learners at all levels. The subtle differences between vowels might have caused the learners’ production problems. Findings also showed that learners’ L1 vowels that are different from the BrE vowels were easier to produce, and this is congruent with the SLM.