(1858.pdf) ETHIOPIAN LEARNERS' PERCEPTUAL DIFFICULTIES IN ENGLISH SEGMENTAL PHONEMES

摘要

The study investigated Amharic native speaking Ethiopian learner's detection and recognition ofEnglish phonemic items which are foreign to the learners and yet that are used distinctively andfunctionally in the target language input. Novel English vowels and consonants tentatively predicted ascontrastive based problem areas of English pronunciation for the Amharic speaking learners weretargeted. The resultant list of English phonemes the study targeted comprised short vowels /?, ?, ?,?/; long vowels /i:, a:, ?:, u:, ?:/; diphthongs /e?, a?, ??, a?, ??, ?a, e?, ??/; and consonants /?, d/. SixtyAmharic native speaking undergraduate students participated in this study by completing forcedauditory tasks after listening to audio stimuli presenting utterances with targets sound features. Eachresponse provided by the subjects for each audio stimulus was first coded for correctness relative tothe particular target sound item presented. To assess the extent of perception errors the subjectscommitted, and to obtain the final inventory of difficulty areas, the total incorrect score each sounditem received was changed to percentage scores based on the total number of 60 responses from thesubjects. Similarly, mean percentage error score each target received was computed and analyzedrelative to scores for individual target features included in the test. The result showed that overall,English pronunciation features which are foreign to the native language Amharic still exert severedifficulty for university level Amharic native subjects to discriminate, identify, and recognize. Thefindings also considered communication constraints that could be stemming from the learners'difficulty to distinguish novel English phonemes, and to make meaning out of them in spoken English.This was evident in the learners' considerable failure to recognize the most familiar words in Englishwhich were presented with novel segmental phonemes. Some variations of difficulty level the subjectsexperienced towards contrastive based problem areas were verified. Findings of this study support thefocus on the role of English pronunciation which are foreign to the learners' native language, theimportance of balancing perceptual as well as productive skills, and the need for developing L1-basedand empirically informed pronunciation syllabus than using generic and intuitively producedpronunciation training materials. The findings provide issues that future research should furtherexplore and extend to a number of other dimensions.