The relation between the L1 & L2 Vowels Acoustic Features of Iranian Intermediate EFL Learners: An Investigation of phonological transfer

Although the number of vowels that can be identified in English and Persian can differ depending on different analyses of linguists, it is obvious that there are considerably more vowels in English than in Persian and there are differences in their places of articulation in the two languages. These are observed to be the reasons that pronunciation errors are made among the Iranian EFL learners. This study aimed to investigate whether the acoustic qualities of the vowels in L1 negatively transferred to the L2 production or not.The participants were 30 EFL intermediate male monolingual native speakers of Persian language in Tehran, Iran. The participants, estimated through an oral test, had passed a reading course with the same instructor. An intermediate text, each including 20 sentences, were prepared by the researcher to be read aloud by the participants, and then a list of vocabularies was shown and specific words were pointed out to be read. The specific words in these sentences were intended to contain specific vowels to cause difficulties for Persian speakers of English. Additionally, the researcher evaluated the participants’ self-reports and on pronunciation errors to inspect the errors and also to indirectly estimate their latent knowledge of the issue.Differences between language systems were considered to be the ground for learners' difficulties. According to the result of the pre-test and posttest and the hypothesis, the result shows the teaching English vowel acoustic features is effective in improving the accuracy of students’ reading- aloud to EFL intermediate male monolingual native speakers of Persian language who were from a private English institute.

کلیدواژه ها:

Acoustic Phonetics ، Phonological transfer ، Language Transfer ، Error Analysis ، Phonological Awareness ، Negative Transfer