The Impact of colloquial Iraqi language on the pronunciation of English language learners

Pronunciation is considered as one of important features of spoken language. It is crucially important, as it is usually the first thing people notice about English language learners. The present study is a phonological one that tries to answer a nagging question asked by both Iraqi teachers and learners of English whether or not the colloquial Iraqi Arabic has an impact on the pronunciation of English and to find out the reasons behind the mispronunciation of Iraqi learners of English. To answer such a question, an experiment is administered at governmental Iraqi Secondary Schools for (100) learners: (50) boys and (50) girls at fourth/fifth class who are at the same age 16/17 years. The experiment includes two parts: a pretest of English proficiency and a protest which includes recording learners reading a Standard English text and a colloquial Iraqi one. Accurate pronunciation of Iraqi learners for English sounds either means they have acquired them (English sounds) well enough or they have similar sounds in their language or they are talented while inaccurate pronunciation means that interference or dissimilarity of sound system of two languages is the reason behind that. Contrastive linguistics and Errors analysis in Second Language Acquisition (SLA) are used to analyze the data. Gender, educational background and geographical area of the learners‟ are some factors that play a great role in their English pronunciation

Keywords:

pronunciation , phonological study , Contrastive linguistics , Errors analysis , Second Language Acquisition (SLA)