As an Arabic speaker, I have found that pronunciation of vowels is a common issue with many Arabic speakers who are not only children, but also adults, such as my husband. These are difficult to Arab speakers because English has many vowel sounds while Arabic only has a few vowel sounds. According to Swan and Smith (2013), English has 22 vowels and diaphones to 24 consonants while Arabic has eight vowels and diaphones to 32 consonants. Further, they explained that one of Arabic’s features is the use of glottal stops before initial vowels, thus breaking up the natural catenations of English.

 

 

 

 

 

     I noticed that Ahmed had difficulty in distinguishing between the /a/ sound and the /e/ sound in either reading or writing the vowel phonemes. For example, when his ESL teacher asked him to write down the word “ pet” he wrote it “pat”. Another challenge was pronouncing the sound /e/ instead of /ɪ/, hence words like "pit", "pet", "put", "pot", and "pat", for example, would be hard for Ahmed to read or write. 

 

 

 

 

 

      Mrs.Tyler used a strategy called the stretching out words to solve Ahmed’s challenge. By using this method in reading words, he slowly pronounced each sound in a word (d–o–g), and then said the sounds quickly together to "read" the word (dog) by using his hands. The other method that Mrs.Tyler used to help Ahmed to produce and distinguish these sounds is Animated Literacy‏ which is:

       A comprehensive, researched-based, multisensory approach to reading, writing,and oral                    language instruction that moves students from the earliest stages of literacy to fluency and                independence in reading and writing at a third-grade level.Phonological awareness, phonics,             vocabulary development, comprehension, and fluency are all key elements of the program. (Stone Jim)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

     

     

       According to Burt and Peyton(2003), teaching the English symbol system as well as English sound-symbol letters can help learners in distinguishing the confusion between sounds. There are 22 vowel sound symbols, each symbol represents one sound, and represents an area in the articulatory space. Thus, there are two strategies to teach vowel sounds symbols. First, by using pictures that describe tongue position of the vowel sounds, so to teach the distinguish between the vowel [i] as in head and the vowel [ɪ] as in hid, for example, the teacher has to clarify for the learners that the sounds are different as well as the vowel in hid is longer. Inconsistent with Reetz and Jongman(2009) the sound [i] is pronounced with the fronted tongue raised toward the palate whereas the sound [ɪ] is pronounced same as [i], but a bit lower and further back. The other strategy is by using the Multi-Speech program. The teacher can record her voice first then show the spectrogram of the sounds to the student, then ask the student to do the same and compare his spectrogram with his teacher’s. That will definitely increase his awareness of the sounds.

 

 

 

 

 

     Ahmed also had struggled in distinguishing between /p/ and /b/ sounds. For example, he pronounced the word “play” /blei/ instead of / plei/, and he even was confused when his ESL teacher corrected him because he did not perceive the difference between the two sounds. Also, he pronounced /v/ sound as /f/ and /q/ as /k/. These are common issues that could be found with most of the Arab speakers. When I asked his ESL teacher about this problem she said that it was normal to find these problems not only because he was an Arab learner, but also because it was normal to find in beginner learners, and she would not see it as a big issue unless it continued with him in older age. Swan and Smith said that the sounds /p/ and /b/ are treated as allophones and used “rather randomly” by Arab learners of English (p.197). The reason is that these letters or sounds /p/,/v/, and /q/ are not found in the Arabic language, so learners try to pronounce these sounds as familiar sounds or phonemes that they knew in their first language instead of trying to pronounce the actual sounds. Even though it is not a problem in oral communication, it may slow Ahmed’s writing skill. For instance, words such as pray and bray, park and bark, and fan and van are spelled the same except the first letter and their meaning is extremely different.

 

Suggistion to help Ahmed in distinguishing between these sounds: 

 

     To solve this problem as I mentioned earlier is by using a piece of paper in front of the learner’s mouth while he pronounces the confusing sounds to figure out the differences between the sounds. The other solution would be using activities such as a missing letter, matching words with pictures, spilling, and copying.