Phonological Problems of Omani EFL Learners: Pedagogical Perspectives and Implications

Thakur, Vijay S.

doi:10.24093/awej/vol11no1.3

Cited by 6 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 5 publications

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“…As students are confused with some sounds, they tend to put such sounds with other sounds similar to their L1. This concurs with Thakur (2020) who demonstrated that some factors that produce incorrect pronunciation are first language interfering with the target language and lack of exposure to an English-practicing environment.…”

Section: Section One: What Are the Challenges That Efl Students' Face...supporting

confidence: 89%

Learning English in an Arabic context: a study of first-year Libyan university students' challenges in the learning of English.

Aljoundi

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This study sought to identify the challenges that lecturers and students faced in developing English language communicative competence for academic purposes at a university within the College of Humanities situated in Zliten city in the north of Libya. This research canvassed students’ and lecturers’ experiences and perceptions in the teaching and learning of academic English in a foreign language context. Within a case study approach, a convergent mixed methods research design was used. Data was collected through qualitative and quantitative methods in an interpretative paradigm. The study employed three data generation methods, a semi-structured interview, focus group discussion, and questionnaires. The findings suggest that the qualitative and quantitative findings in this study can be classified into four categories of EFL Libyan learning challenges namely: linguistic, cultural, institutional, and structural challenges. Linguistic challenges are those related to language issues confronted by both lecturers and students. Most participants (lecturers and students) agreed that Arabic and English are linguistically dissimilar. They are unable to comprehend academic literature in the English language because of the phonological differences between Arabic and English. It is considered the most common linguistic challenge with respect to student anxiety and inadequacy regarding the attainment of academic English proficiency. The cultural challenge manifests as a dissonance between students’ cultural predilections and the decoding required for meaning making in English as a foreign language. A cultural insistence and expectation for Arabic hegemonic communication exacerbates the development of communicative competence in the target language. Institutional challenges are described as the general position of higher education in Libya, and the problems students encounter when joining this education system. The effect of insular politics also negatively impacts effective institutional operations. Finally, structural challenges were related to the overall teaching program coherence. This included the lack of appropriate curriculum design standards and poorly designed policies of English language teaching and learning. The study concludes by making suggestions to improve communicative competence in the target language at the research site.

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Section: Section One: What Are the Challenges That Efl Students' Face...supporting

confidence: 89%

Learning English in an Arabic context: a study of first-year Libyan university students' challenges in the learning of English.

Aljoundi

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“…Yemeni EFL learners' substitution of /ʤ/ with /ʒ/ or /j/ was found by some previous researchers (e.g., Bin Hadjah & Hamzah, 2022;Hamzah, Bin Hadjah, et al, 2020), while Arab learners' replacement of /ʤ/ with /g/ by was discovered in some prior studies (e.g., Tajeldeen, 2019;Thakur, 2020).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 61%

Production and perception of English consonants by Yemeni EFL learners

Hadjah¹,

Hamzah

2023

Indonesian J. Appl. Linguist.

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Many previous studies on the perception-production correlation focused mainly on transcriptions and native English speaker evaluations for production accuracy assessments; only a few included acoustic measurements. The purpose of this study is to examine the production and perception of six English consonants by Yemeni EFL learners of English using an acoustic measurement of L2 production in order to better understand the link between production and perception. It has three objectives: (1) To investigate the extent to which word position influences the accuracy of Yemeni EFL learners’ production of the target consonants, (2) to examine the extent to which word position affects their perception, and (3) to examine the relationship between the overall production and perception of the investigated sounds. A quantitative research method was employed to collect data from six Yemeni EFL postgraduate students from Universiti Utara Malaysia (UUM). In the production tasks, the speakers were asked to produce seventy-two words with the target consonants three times in isolation (Experiment 1) and the other three times in a carrier sentence (Experiment 2). The researchers recorded the speakers’ productions with an iPhone and later evaluated them acoustically via Praat. In the perception test, an AXB experiment was conducted. The stimuli were read by a native male speaker of Australian English. The findings showed that word position significantly affected the production, yet not the perception of the target sounds. Moreover, an insignificant positive moderate correlation was revealed between the overall production and perception of the target consonants. Results have implications for L2 speech and pronunciation instruction and learning. Teachers may focus more on specific sound environments that lead learners to struggle while producing/perceiving particular English sounds.

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“…We agree upon Thakur's (2020) assumption that "if one wants to talk naturally and effectively, he/she should learn to recognize and avoid phonological errors" (p. 32). No doubt, if one's pronunciation is defective, the listener will not listen to her/his ideas, and careless pronunciation will annoy or amuse the listeners (Thakur, 2020 Chinese -水 (shuǐ / water) and 谁 (shuí / who); 八(bā / eight), 拔(bá / pull out), 疤 (bā / a scar), 罢 (bà / to stop, cease, dismiss someone). Mispronunciation of English and Chinese words can lead to phonological misbalance.…”

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confidence: 81%

A Comparative Analysis of English and Chinese Reading: Phonetics, Vocabulary and Grammar

Bogush¹,

Korolova²,

Popova³

2020

AWEJ

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The article covers the issues related to the development of reading skills of the students majoring/minoring in English and Chinese (as non-native languages). In the backdrop of linguistic differences between English and Chinese, this action research was conducted to investigate the components of the reading skills, which are to be developed within the Bachelor programs. The primary purpose of the article is to analyze the methodological background for teaching Ukrainian students to perceive information from authentic texts. The methods of induction and deduction enabled us to analyze and generalize the theoretical bases for the investigated topic, to systemize the results of the study (the reading tactics and strategies, classification of reading activities). The study was based on focused observation using the register as a tool for data collecting for two semesters each in three groups of third-year students at Ushynsky University. The total sample size was 54. The article presents an analysis of difficulties in reading English and Chinese texts: 1) phonological level – differences in sound pronunciation (English: /T/, /D/ /w/, /N/, /x/, etc.; Chinese: the alveolo-palatal consonants j, q, x; affricates zh, z; consonant r, etc.), the phonetic phenomena (English: nasal plosion, lateral plosion, loss of plosion, assimilation, reduction/elision, etc.; Chinese: tone, erization); 2) lexical level – conversion (in English) and transposition (in Chinese), homonymy, polysemy; 3) grammatical level – the division of lexicon into parts of speech, different word order in English and Chinese sentences, (non)segmentation of English and Chinese syntagms/clauses/compound sentences, use of tenses, etc. The article contains some recommendations for English and Chinese reading classrooms.

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Phonological Problems of Omani EFL Learners: Pedagogical Perspectives and Implications

Cited by 6 publications

References 5 publications

Learning English in an Arabic context: a study of first-year Libyan university students' challenges in the learning of English.

Learning English in an Arabic context: a study of first-year Libyan university students' challenges in the learning of English.

Production and perception of English consonants by Yemeni EFL learners

A Comparative Analysis of English and Chinese Reading: Phonetics, Vocabulary and Grammar

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