L2 Acquisition Of Arabic Guttural Consonants By L1 English Speakers: The Impact Of Intervention

Abstract

The aim of this study is to investigate the role intervention plays in the acquisition of Standard Arabic (SA) guttural consonants by English native speakers. It addresses the issue of how the phoneme inventory of L1 interacts with that of L2 and to what extent the implementation of an intervention may have an impact on L2 learners’ phonological acquisition. Acquiring the phonological component of a second language may be very challenging when learners are exposed to an L2 phonological system that has sounds and sound patterns that are not similar to those of their native language. English-speaking learners of Standard Arabic, which is a semitic language that is typologically different from theirs, are expected to find difficulties with consonants that are not part of their phonological representation. These basically include guttural consonants, namely q, x, ɣ, ħ, ʕ, tˤ, dˤ and sˤ, which constitute almost the third of the 28 Arabic consonants. The Arabic emphatic (pharyngealized) consonants tˤ, dˤ, and sˤ, for instance, are very demanding because they are produced by two simultaneous articulations, a primary and a secondary one, and they involve, in addition to this, the pharynx, which is an inactive articulator in the English language. This suggests that acquiring this category of speech sounds is very challenging from an articulatory perspective and will certainly be subject to a great deal of cross-language mapping. The findings have shown that intervention tasks contribute significantly to an improvement in production.