TRAINING AMERICAN-ENGLISH SPEAKERS IN THE PERCEPTION AND PRODUCTION OF ARABIC EMPHATIC CONSONANTS

Abstract

The present study investigated the role played by communicative pronunciation instruction as opposed to the traditional form-based approach in the perception and production of Arabic emphatic-plain contrasts by beginning-level English-speaking learners of Arabic. The participants in this study were 19 English-speaking students enrolled in ARAB 110 for the Fall of 2017 in the Department of African and African-American Studies at the University of Kansas. Nine participants were randomly assigned to the experimental group and the other ten participants were assigned to the control group. The participants in the experimental group received instruction based on the communicative pronunciation unit designed for this study in addition to the in-class listen-and-repeat drills, whereas the participants in the control group received only in-class listen-and-repeat drills. The study consisted of perception and production tests (i.e. pre-tests) followed by a period of 90 minutes of instruction. The period of instruction was then followed by the same perception and production tests (i.e. post-tests). The instructional period focused mostly on presenting the target emphatic-plain consonant contrasts in minimal pairs through a variety of formats. The pre- and post-tests were (a) two perception tasks, i.e., a discrimination task and an identification task and (b) a production task. The results indicated a positive effect of both the communicative and traditional form-based approaches. Even though no statistically significant differences between the perception and production pre- and post-tests across the participants in the control and experimental groups were found, numerical differences do exist in favor of communicative pronunciation instruction.