Assimilation in standard English and Baghdai Arabic

Abstract EN

The present study is an attempt to shed light on one aspect of connected speech, that is the term " assimilation " most of the EFL students complain that they do not understand much of native speakers speech because their speech is so fast .Speech is considered a continuous stream of sounds without clear cut among the words.The learners( non – native) rarely able to predict the words in particular situation.Within connect speech learners should take in their consideration that speech is not just sentences or phrases uttered in isolated words.

Connected speech has many changes on an isolated words that made up of.

Assimilation, which is the concern of this study, plays a role in this problem for the phonological shape of a word when it is spoken in isolation and when it occurs in a phrases depending on the immediate environment of the words.

Learners find difficulty in understanding English as a foreign language is often learned on the basis of isolated word form.

The following example illustrates this problem word in isolation "bless" /bles/, within context " bless you" /bleʃju/.

Another problem may raise that learners tend to make assimilation due to the influence of their native language (Arabic), i.e.

they tend to make certain assimilation where they are not required in the following examples will clarify this point: in Arabic "fad " one only, "dʒigaara" cigarette the Arabic assimilation 'fadʒ dʒigaara'.This study aims to focus on the difficult areas of assimilation patterns.

The tentative hypotheses of the study: similar assimilation patterns in both languages(Arabic and English) .Baghdadi assimilation that has no influence by English assimilation of the non-native speaker.