Arab EFL Learner Perceptions of English Phonemes: A Cross-Language Phonetic Interference

Abstract

The extant studies addressing second language phonetic perception assume that second language phonemes are perceived to be similar to first language phonemes, and tend to be substituted by learners of English as a foreign language. This study aimed to assess the perceptual relationship between the phonemes of English and the sound units of Omani Arabic of the Al-Dakhiliyah region to discover the extent of the influence exerted by Omani Arabic on the perception of English phonemes by Omani learners. Two instruments were constructed to achieve this goal: first, the Omani phonetic system was elucidated via a questionnaire and the consonants and vowels uttered by the Omani people were archived as a phonetic dialect; second, a test was created to examine the perceptual phonetic distance between Omani Arabic and English phonemes. This investigation was designed to test the hypothesis of the revised speech learning model. The results confirmed the model’s postulation that learners instinctively and reflexively associate the second language sounds to the phonetic groups of their first language.