An Applied Contrastive Analysis of Consonants in Egyptian Colloquial Arabic and Received Pronunciation of British English

Abstract

This study aims to investigate the common pronunciation difficulties that face Egyptian university students learning English consonant sounds. It presents an applied contrastive analysis between Egyptian Colloquial Arabic and the Received Pronunciation of British English. It is a quantitative and qualitative research that applies the contrastive analysis to a group of fifty-two Egyptian university students who were randomly selected from the faculty of languages and translation at Sadat Academy and the center of languages and translation at Cairo University as it targets to discover their pronunciation difficulties in pronouncing British English consonant sounds. The study utilized an oral test instrument, which has been designed by the research and validated by a professor in linguistics, two times to measure the pronunciation of the students before and after adopting the contrastive analysis in learning the English consonant pronunciation. According to the results of the oral test, it is clear that the students have faced difficulties in pronouncing a group of twelve consonant sounds which are /p/, /t/, /d/, /ð/, /θ/, /ʒ/, /ʃ/, /tʃ/, /dʒ/, /ŋ/, /l/, and /r/. Therefore, the students have attended a pronunciation course to work on their errors. The results of the overall oral exam before and after the course have been analyzed using Statistical Package for the Social Science "SPSS" which has shown that using contrastive analysis has had a significant effect on 92.3% of students' pronunciation of English consonants. This study contributed to settling that contrastive analysis is advantageous in learning the pronunciation of a second language.