دراسة اجتماعية-صوتية حول أثراختلافات اللهجات لدى الطلبة الكرد متعلمي الإنجليزية كلغة أجنبية في إنتاج أصوات العِلّة القصيرة في اللغة الإنجليزي

الملخص

Acquiring a native-like pronunciation is one of the prominent goals of learning English phonology. However, achieving this goal is laden with difficulties; native language variation of the learners is one of these factors. Achieving this goal is typically linked to immersion in social and cultural language learning. This exploratory study seeks to determine the effects of Kurdish dialect variation on English short vowels’ pronunciation among EFL learners. It aims to highlight the causes of such mispronunciations. It also investigates three major Kurdish dialects, namely, Northern, Central, and Southern, to determine the systematic effects of Kurdish dialect variations on English phonological learning. To achieve the aims of the study, 45 EFL university students across various Kurdish dialects from the English department in the College of Basic Education at Salahaddin University-Erbil were purposively selected to participate in the current study and perform speech production tasks.  Audacity software program is used to analyze data’s acoustic properties, such as frequencies, pitch formants, and vowel durations. The sound articulation and acoustic analysis revealed that Kurdish dialect variations, as a sociophonetic factor, have a positive transfer and interference in shaping English vowel production among Kurdish EFL learners.