The Effect of Pronunciation on Performing Religious Rituals of Illiterate Prayers: Studying Surah’s al-Tawhid and al-Hamd

The effect of language on culture has been an interesting issue in applied linguistics. One
of the main critical domains of culture-related language issues is pronunciation. The
importance of pronunciation in some cultures is doubled when its importance goes beyond the
daily use of language. Many illiterate Muslims in non-Arab countries must perform their
religious duties in accurate Arabic pronunciation. Since illiterate learners can not be treated
with regular and traditional educational intervention to complete this incumbent religious
task, the current research has employed dynamic intervention, an approach adopted from the
socio-cultural theory of Vygotsky (۱۹۷۸), for instructing a sample of these people in Iran.
First, the main pronunciation problems of these participants were identified. Then using a
native speaker’s judgment, the effect of this educational intervention was calculated in a
pretest-posttest design. A paired t-test was used to interpret the collected data. The findings
showed that dynamic intervention has a meaningful effect on the improvement of
pronunciation in the Iranian illiterate participants of the study. This study could have
implications for language teachers, language learners, and researchers in different fields of
sociolinguistics and applied linguistics.

Keywords:

Dynamic Intervention , Illiterate Learners , Pronunciation , Socio-Cultural Theory.