A Study of Chadian Learners/ Speakers of English’s Pronunciation

Abstract

With the development of English as the world’s lingua franca, there is a serious rush for the language by many countries, which have no past history with Britain, the US or any other country of the Inner Circle (Kachru 1988). Chad, which was colonized by France is one of those countries (Anderson 2008). In those countries, where English is generally learnt as a foreign language by an elitist group, the language progressively develops and has local stable features among it speakers. With the increasing number of Chadian learners of English in Nigerian, Sudanese and Cameroonian universities, as well as in other English-speaking countries, it is interesting to look at the way they pronounce English words. From the interlanguage framework, this study analyses some speech produced by postgraduate Chadian learners of English (N=20). The focus is on some difficult consonants, consonant clusters, vowels and word stress.

English Pronunciation Learning Challenges: A Case study of Mundu EFL learners in Chad

“…These factors predict various difficulties, notably, segmental and supra-segmental errors that will be committed by learners (Nkongho, 2021). To illustrate, results of another recent study (Safotso, 2018) analysing the speech produced by some post-graduate Chadian students, confirmed that Chadian learners of English actually face difficulties in articulating most English consonants and vowels as well as the placement of correct word stress. These deviances in phoneme articulation and word stress placement, undoubtedly, resulted from the negligence of pronunciation instruction through the above mentioned educational factors.…”

Chadian Learners’/Users’ Preferred Variety(ies) of English

“…For the past twenty years, Chadian learners and users of English have been having a strong interest in the language. Their number in Cameroonian, Nigerian, Ghanaian and Sudanese universities as well as in linguistic centres in N'Djamena testifies to this (Anderson, 2008;Safotso, 2018;Safotso & Ndoubangar, 2018). It can be pointed out that the petrol boom in the country has really changed the attitudes of Chadians towards the English language.…”

A Study of Some Morphological Problems of Chadian Learners of English

“…However, there is a problem concerning the efficient use of the standard varieties as many factors cause important deviations. To date very little research has been carried out on English in Chad (Anderson, 2008;Safotso, 2018;Safotso & Ndoubangar, 2018, 2020. Most information can rather be found in students' dissertations (Alladoum, 2014;Ndoubangar, 2018;Titibeye, 2020;Ngaidandi, 2021;Tao, 2021), etc.…”