Overgeneralisation and interferance in EFL learners' pronunciation
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Date
2015
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university of Oum-El-Bouaghi
Abstract
This study is concerned with the identification, the analysis and classification of pronunciation errors made by first year Master students of english at Larbi Ben M'Hidi university. These errors are attributed to two major urces:anovergeneralization of english pronunciation rules and/or an interference of specific French vowel sounds, particularly at the level of the english sounds /e/ and/or /?/. Accordingly, this research seeks to explore the extent to which these sources affect students' pronunciation. A brief theoretical framework covers aspects of speech articulation and error analysis with a focus on the pre-mentioned sources of error. The fieldwork is conducted following a descriptive analytical method with a voice recording technique to collect oral data. Analyses are carried out to fulfil the main
objective of this dissertation. The outcome of the overall procedure establishes valid evidence that the two pre-determined sources appear to influence learners' pronunciation to a considerable extent. The significance of this research emanates
from the fact that previous studies fail to emphasize overgeneralization in the case of pronunciation and only scant work has been done in regard to multilingualism when the two foreign languages being learnt have a two-way effect if they are hugely
similar. In attempt to fill in this gap, the research is executed to raise awareness of those errors so that teachers can try to prevent or remediate them.
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Keywords
Teaching : english : pronunciation