The Perception of English Consonants by Arab ELF Learners. A Case Study of University Students at ZU.

Abstract

The present research focuses on the perception of English consonant sounds by the learners of English at university level. English and Arabic, genetically two different languages, share some common features. They also exhibit a lot of differences. These differences are the main source of difficulty in the learning of English as a foreign language and vice-versa. Some Arabic speakers perform oddly on a range of experimental tasks which involve word discrimination. All these tasks involve discriminating words with identical vowel patterns, but differing in their consonants. Some Arabic learners, it seems, are consciously inaccurate in handling consonants in English words, and much more prone to make errors involving consonants than subjects of other mother tongue background. One possible explanation to these errors 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 vowel variations placed within the consonantal framework. From a pedagogical point of view, such differences between the two languages will be determined and included in the various teaching material. In other words, teaching will be directed on these 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 consonants. The results of the present paper would in turn encourage instructors to follow similar procedures in their teaching of sounds at university level in particular.

On the perceptual accuracy of non-native phonemic contrasts: A case study of Native Arabic Speakers

“…Moreover, these findings are also consistent with the conclusions of Alzahrani (2015) and Moustafa (1979), who reported that their Arabic participants generally experienced difficulty in the perception of non-native English speech categories. However, they are incompatible with the conclusions reported in the studies of Bauli ( 2010), Evans and Alshangiti (2018), Salim andAlbadawi (2017), andShafiro et al (2012), whose Arabic participants were generally able to perceive non-native English speech categories. As mentioned in section (1), the Arabic participants in these studies performed well because they had already obtained substantial exposure to the English language, they were early bilinguals, or they had received ample prior training and practice.…”

“…Several researchers (e.g., Bradlow and Pisoni, 1997;Perlmutter, 1989;Rochet, 1995) have also indicated that the perception of foreign language speech sounds will improve significantly when learners are given more language training or instruction. These reasons explain clearly why the participants in the studies of Bauli ( 2010), Evans and Alshangiti (2018), Salim andAlbadawi (2017), andShafiro et al (2012) were able to perceive the non-native categories, whereas our participants were not. The participants in the current study had not experienced substantial exposure to the English language and did not receive any kind of training or practice.…”

“…In contrast, Salim and Albadawi (2017) found, in their study on the perception of English consonantal phonemes by Jordanian learners of English at the college level, that the participants performed well in differentiating between the categories /p/ and /b/ after four weeks of training and practice. Before training and practice were provided, their performance was very poor.…”

“…As presented in section (1), earlier research in cross-language speech perception has drawn various conclusions: some studies have revealed that L2 speakers encounter difficulty in the perception of nonnative phonemic contrasts (e.g., Alzahrani, 2015;Brown, 2000;Flege, 1995;Lisker, 1970;Moustafa, 1979;Price, 1981), while others concluded that they largely did not experience such difficulty (e.g., Buali, 2010;Evans & Alshangiti, 2018;Salim & Albadawi, 2017;Shafiro et al, 2012). Therefore, we conducted this study, which principally aimed to examine the overall perceptual accuracy of the English labial categories /p, b, f, and v/ in onset positions performed by native Arabic speakers, aged 19-21 years old.…”

Role of visual element in spoken English discourse: implications for YouTube technology in EFL classrooms

“…Considering the rapid increase of English classes as an outcome of globalization, it has become extremely critical to be able to communicate in the global language, English. For Arab countries, this proliferation of English serves as a great challenge based on the difference from its source language Arabic (Salim and Al-Badawi, 2017). Given the development of Arab economies, this research is particularly centred on developing an understanding of the performance difference which emerges owing to the inclusion of videos in the EFL curriculum.…”