The Influence of a Mother Tongue on English Pronunciation While Acquiring English as a Second Language

Abstract

This study aims to investigate the role of the mother tongue on English pronunciation in the acquisition of a second language. Many people face issues while acquiring English as a second language. These issues can be divided into two main categories: the impact of a mother tongue on second language and ineffective teaching approaches. This study focuses on the first category which means the influence of the native language of the learner on their acquisition of the target language. The researcher used a mixed method in the present study and asked the participants to record their voices while pronouncing certain vowels and consonants. After that, the data were collected and analyzed from audio recordings based on the International Phonetic Alphabet system. There are 40 participants including 20 females and 20 males from four nationalities: Saudi, Mexican, Turkish, Filipino. The results showed that the findings of the study answered the research questions about the influence of the mother tongue on learners’ pronunciation while acquiring English as a second language. It showed that participants faced problems because of the influence of their mother tongue. It also answered the second research question about the difference between L2 learners’ pronunciation based on their gender. In general, there was a difference between genders when pronouncing English by learners from different countries, where male participants had higher numbers of mispronunciations than female participants.