Abstract
This study investigates the difficulties that Iraqi EFL learners face in uttering English British complex vowels; diphthongs and triphthongs in connected speech. It reports on the pronunciation test performed by the fourth level college learners whose Baghdadi Arabic is their mother tongue. Gender is of interest to this study to find out if females experience more hardship and perpetrate more mistakes than females or vice versa. Poor pronunciation leads to miscommunication, that is why this study is concerned with the phonology, and how words are pronounced within sentences, as being the main channel of communication is speech, especially with correct pronunciation and as that the Iraqi college learners’ most noticeable pronunciation mistakes are with English vowels chiefly diphthongs and triphthongs.
Highlights
Being fluent or native-like speakers is one of the main aims of the second language (L2) learners
Wells clarifies that Triphthong is “a term used in the phonetic classification of vowel sounds on the basis of their manner of articulation: it refers to a type of vowel where there are two noticeable changes in quality during a syllable, as in a common pronunciation of English fire and tower /faIǝ / and /taʊ ǝ / (Well, 1982,p306-310)”
Results & Conclusion Since the study targeting the English British diphthongs and triphthongs, the pronunciation tests manifest that both females and males, generally speaking, have problems to control their speech apparatus to pronounce these sounds correctly, with a little proportion that females surpassed males
Summary
Being fluent or native-like speakers is one of the main aims of the second language (L2) learners. The most significant language skill, starts naturally with learning other language aspects; like other language skills a learner needs to learn how to pronounce L2 sounds correctly. It is by good pronunciation a speaker is evident in spite of many errors s(he) commits during connected speech. Some argue that phonology is concerned with the functions of speech sounds; on that definition, phonology is a “functional phonetics” Another elucidation of phonology is of the mentalistic ideation (i.e. Chomesky‟s cognitive theory) which represents the sound systems, of any language, as abstract objects or images of the sounds stored in the mind of the speaker combined afterwards to make meaningful words for communication. According to Finch (1997, p166) “Phonology is concerned with the sound structure of the language, in particular with the way in which sounds can form words structure”
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