How colloquial Iraqi Language affects the Pronunciation of English Language learners

This study is an attempt to answer a nagging question asked by both teachers and learners of English whether or not the colloquial Iraqi Arabic (CIA) has an impact on the pronunciation of English. Pronunciation is one of the important features of spoken language. Pronunciation is crucially important, as it is usually the first thing people notice about language learners. The accurate pronunciation of Iraqi learners for English sounds means either they have acquired them (English sounds) well enough or they have similar sounds in their own language. While the wrong pronunciation may mean that the similarity is not always a good factor for precise pronunciation neither they have those sounds in their language. 100 Iraqi subjects from governmental schools participate in this study. All ofthem are at 15/16 years old and in fourth/fifth secondary class. Contrastive Linguistics and Error Analysis are used to analyze students‟ errors. Based on the findings, the study concluded that factors such as Interference, the differences in the sound system in the two languages, inconsistency of English sounds and spelling militate against Iraqi learners of English competence in pronunciation

Keywords:

colloquial Iraqi Arabic (CIA) , Pronunciation , Contrastive Linguistics , Error Analysis , interference