Pronunciation errors and repair strategies made by northern upper Egypt EFL learners : a case study of the production of English sound segments by first year English department students in Beni-suef

Abstract EN

The objective of the present study is to investigate the errors made in the field of pronunciation.

It explores Egyptian EFL learners' production of 37 English monophthongs including 25 consonant sounds and 12 pure vowel sounds.

So, it is related to the segmental level.

English diphthongs and consonant clusters are excluded from the study.

It also focuses on the repair strategies employed by students to avoid the use of the target language sounds.

The participants are ten first year students in the Department of English Language and Literature, Faculty of Arts, Beni-Suef University in the academic year 2016/2017.

The method adopted in the research is reading aloud English extracts encompassing all the sounds under examination.

For each of the 37 tested sounds, the frequency and percentage of correct production for each of the selected words representing the sound are calculated.

In addition, the total frequency and percentage of correct pronunciation for each of the tested sounds are calculated.

The findings of the study revealed that fourteen English sounds constitute a source of difficulty for learners including the nine consonants; /v/, /ʒ/, /dʒ/, /ŋ/, /tʃ/, /θ/, /p/, dark /l/ and /ð/, and the six vowel sounds /ʌ/, /ɔ: /, /ɜ: /, /ə/, /ʊ/ and /e/.

The study tries to relate the outcome pronunciation errors to the learners' mother tongue or to the effect of negative transfer.