L1 interference in the perception and production of English vowels by Arabic speakers

THE PROBLEM: Various learners of ESL have various problems regarding English pronunciation. Most languages have a five-vowel phonetic system and the complicated sixteen-vowel English phonetic system seems difficult to master for ESL learners. Moreover, ESL learners with Arabic L1 find it even more difficult due to their native tongue's three-vowel phonetic system. The absence of lax vowels from their phonetic system and the lack of necessity to differentiate between vowels on the basis of tenseness, might cause instances of negative transfer.;METHOD: Twenty beginning and twenty-one advanced ESL students with Arabic L1 participated in two instruments: one of them was designed to test their perception, and the other - their production. In the perception instrument, the participants had to perform a phoneme identification task, i.e. they were asked to circle the correct phoneme that they hear. In the production test, the same participants were asked to read words containing the lax vowels and record their voices using the computer program Audacity. Then, 3 raters (all TESOL professionals) were asked to determine whether the recorded vowels sounded native-like, and if not, what vowel were they the closest to.;RESULTS: This study provides evidence that even though students' levels grow, sometimes they still make the same errors in pronunciation. Thus, problems with the same vowels continued in to the advanced level. This research helped delineate the differences between the Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis and the SLM method in that it found that CAH is supported when it comes to perception, but SLM -- for production. The acquisition of vowels depends greatly on L1 and this study found evidence for the existence of nonnative contrasts, but they are also influenced by difficulties in L2, by phonetics (vowel space), and by spelling. The vowels that exist in both L1 and L2 were found to be the easiest to perceive and produce (Highly Positive Transfer); the vowels that were similar (only had one phonetic feature different) were the next easiest (Moderately Positive Transfer) to perceive, but not to produce; the vowels that were phonemes in English but allophones in Arabic were more difficult to perceive (Moderately Negative Transfer) but not to produce, and the vowels which do not exist in Arabic were the most difficult to perceive (Highly Negative Transfer) but not to produce.