Diagnostic Assessment of an Arabic Speaker Essay

Diagnostic Assessment of an Arabic Speaker - Essay Example From this study it is clear that the big number of vowels in the English language increases the chances of wrongly pronouncing English words by native Arabic speakers whose first language has lesser vowels. As such, some vowels in English and their corresponding sounds might not exist in Arabic. A good example is Shouq’s pronunciation of ‘can’ as ‘cen’. The ‘a’ sound in such a word is not found in Arabic, and anyone who borrows from their Arabic vowels to read English words will make this pronunciation error. Another word that she pronounced wrongly according to this error is ‘hard’ which sounded like ‘hed’. Moreover, the word ‘that’ was pronounced as ‘thet’.This paper highlights that  Arabic speakers have the problem of replacing ‘t’ with ‘d’ in a word regardless of whether it appears in the middle, start or end of the word. An example is the word ‘nati ve’ that Shouq pronounced as ‘nadive’. This interchanging of ‘t’ and ‘d’ is also evident in the word ‘factor’. Being a native Arabic speaker, Shouq pronounces this word as ‘facdor’, putting a ‘d’ in the place of a ‘t’. An example of such an error occurring at the beginning of a word is with the pronunciation of the word ‘telephone’ which tends to sound like ‘delephone’. This segmental error that is common among native Arabic speakers learning English as a second language is due to the placement of the tongue when pronouncing the words.