The Arabic, French and English Vocalic Systems: Their Positive and Negative Transfer by First Year University Students of English

Boudiaf, Naïma (2012) The Arabic, French and English Vocalic Systems: Their Positive and Negative Transfer by First Year University Students of English. ["eprint_fieldopt_thesis_type_phd" not defined] thesis, Université Mohamed Khider - Biskra.

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Abstract

The aim of this research is to identify the causes of distortions in the pronunciation of English vowels made by first year students at Mohamed Khider University of Biskra. This study, which is of an "effect to cause" type, has a behaviourist approach, and an error analysis follows a contrastive analysis which describes then compares the vocalic systems of Arabic – Dialectal Arabic and Modern Standard Arabic – French and English to identify the areas of difficulty. Being confronted, as a teacher, with almost the same errors throughout long teaching years, our eagerness to know more about the causes of errors became stronger and stronger. Our research’s aim is to answer five main questions : - Are students ’errors a consequence of L1, L2, L3, L4 differences ? - Do students ’errors derive from inadequate learning strategies ? - Do students ’errors come from the learning teaching environment ? - Do students ’errors come from the impact of the spelling of French ? - How to eradicate these errors ? or at least how to decrease their number ? Pilot tests were first organized to select the vocalic distortions which seemed the most interesting. They were followed by final tests built almost on the same pattern. The students were recorded. The test battery included spontaneous discussion, loud reading and oral reproduction of recorded words. The collected data is then transcribed into the international phonetic alphabet and studied. The sounds retained are those presenting a high frequency of occurrence and the sounds distorted because of misleading graphemes (mainly due to the French script system). Once the presentation of the vocalic systems done, the nature, number and frequency of learners’ errors are set in tables and then analysed. Acoustic spectograms of the distortions are displayed to support the results of this research. Suggestions to ameliorate the teaching methods and programmes are proposed at the end of this work.

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