Contrastive AnalysisPaper - Research Paper Example

English as a language has developed over the years to become a language that is not only used predominantly between non-native speakers and native speakers but also amongst the non-native speakers. It has thus become critical for any individual wishing to have worldwide communication, to be fluent and use the language appropriately so as to be understood by others and also master how people from diverse cultural backgrounds use the language. (Wahba, E. 1998) Intelligible pronunciation has proved to be a crucial objective in any pronunciation training course.

It’s therefore important to outline objectives that are realistic, relevant and sustainable for the communication needs of the learner. Pronunciation poses a great obstacle in communication thus it should be dealt with cautiously as wrong pronunciation of an item gives a completely different meaning, for instance when one pronounces “angry” for “hungry”, “bin” for “bean”( Huthaily, K. 2003). Contrastive Analysis and possible problems Several Arabic speakers carry out a variety of abnormal tentative tasks which involve discrimination of words.

This entails putting aside words with similar consonantal patterns but with variance in their vowel structure (Huthaily, K. 2003). . s are less important both in writing and in word building, and the sound identification structure relies on the tri-consonantal roots which are the basis of nearly all Arabic words. Word families in Arabic are completed up of sets of words that share a familiar set of three consonants, but differ in the manner in which the vowels are positioned in the consonantal structure.

(White, L. 1989).This kind of word structure applies with much ease among the Semitic languages, but often creates difficulties for learners who want to learn a second language with different structural rules. This is because consonantal structure does not let adequate discrimination of words when its transferred to the lexical structure of English, where consonants are not the only important signals for a reader, but rather emphasizes on the importance of focus on the consonantal structure(Cook, V. J.1992).

It’s because of this that you find that most Arabic learners will use a system of this sort in the early stages of learning English, though majority catch up with the correct handling of English words. Despite this, a few learners carry on this problem and will make small errors like “dismal point” for "decimal point" while others may never have this confusion. In a bid to juice out difficulties that face Arabic learners in learning English, scholars have indentified four elements that cause this. .Some learners are confused by sounds such as; /v/ and /f/ as in ‘fist’ and ‘vest’; /p/ and /b/ as in ‘pan’ and ‘ban’; /s/ and /_/ as in ‘san’ and ‘than’.

Others put in a short vowel to shatter down the long consonant structures, so as to pronounce them as in /s_pr__/ for ‘spring’; /w___d/ for ‘wished’; /_:sk_d/ for ‘asked’ On the other hand, certain diphthongs