Dialectal differences in the Production of English Vowels by Iraqi EFL Learners at University Level

Abstract

The present study investigates whether or not Iraqi EFLLs’ native dialect has an impact on their pronunciation of English monophthongs and to examine the reasons, behind the mispronunciation, they are expected to commit.To achieve this goal, sixty Iraqi participants (30 males and 30 females) speaking two Iraqi dialects i.e. qeltu and gilit dialect, were recruited to perform a speech production task of the eleven English vowels in a /hvd/ context embedded, in a carrier sentence. The data were analyzed using PRAAT to extract first and second formant frequencies and as well as vowel duration for each vowel. Lobanov ANAE Method (2006) was followed to normalize F1 and F2 values. The normalized data were compared to results from Deterding (1997) and walls (1962). After obtaining the acoustic measurements, the collected data were statistically analyzed by implementing two processes of statistical analysis. The first process is the descriptive statistics, such as manual input of data and display them as bar charts that were done using Excel sheets. This was carried out to quantify the data obtained. The second process was inferential statistics, such as independent-sample t-test by using, SPSS software to identify if the results hold any statistical significance.The results showed that Iraqi EFLLs produced the targeted vowels shorter than the control group represented by native English. In terms vowel quality, they produced lower and more fronted vowels than the control group. In addition, this study revealed that there are statistically significant cross-dialectal differences between gilit and qeltu-speaking EFLLs in the production English vowels. It is concluded that learners’ mother tongue plays a considerable role in their production of English vowels