pronunciation errors

This study examines the pronunciation errors of English consonant clusters among Iraqi EFL learners through the lens of Optimality Theory (OT).  For this aim, 40 first-year university students of different majors aged 18-25 years were selected from beginner and lower-intermediate levels based on their scores on Oxford Placement Test. Using different instruments, such as reading instruction and read-aloud test, and being informed from the category of major pronunciation problems by Arabic learners presented by Yavaş (2011), an Optimality Theory-based analysis was adopted in the research. Findings indicated that in pronouncing initial clusters of two consonants, *COMPLEX onset as the high-ranked constraint is frequently violated in Iraqi Arabic (IA), because in IA there are many words started with #CCV. Also, *#CCC is never violated in IA. Since constraints are universal, languages differ only in how they rank them. In pronouncing a coda cluster consisting of two consonants, although *CCcoda is never violated in IA, this constraint is not permuted in the pronunciation of the participants. However, to pronounce words with the structure of VCCC(C)#, it seems that the two low-ranked constraints, namely *CCCCcoda and *CCCcoda in English are permuted to high-ranked constraints in the pronunciation of IA learners.

One of language learning difficulties for Persian speaking learners is the pronunciation of sounds that do not exist in their mother tongue. These sounds include English consonants /w/, /θ/, /ð/, and /ŋ/. Due to the interference of the first language (L1) and the second language (L2), most Persian speaking learners replace the unfamiliar sound in L2 with a similar one in L1. This research, adopting a descriptive-analytic approach, aims to investigate the substitution of each English consonant with their corresponding consonants in Persian through argumentation around their constraints and ranking of Optimality theory in order to avoid interference in the later stages of language learning. To this end, 50 seventh-graders (middle school students) were randomly-selected from those who had not previously attended any English class outside school. Then they were asked to read 10 sentences containing at least 2 words with one of the English consonants /w/, /θ/, /ð/ or /ŋ/. The results show that these students substitute English consonants /w/, /T/, /D/, and /N/ with their corresponding counterparts in Persian [v], [t], [d], and [Nɡ], respectively. In some cases, depending on the consonant position in the syllable, they are replaced by another similar consonants in Persian, as [s] and [z] instead of /T/ and /D/ at coda position.