Errors in English Pronunciation among Arabic Speakers

This book is a contrastive analysis of Arabs’ errors in English pronunciation regarding segmentals—consonants, consonant clusters, and vowels—and suprasegmentals—main word stress. It also explains the main interlingual reasons behind these errors, and presents some teaching suggestions for surmounting them. The findings show that the subjects substitute their own Arabic sounds for unfamiliar English ones, producing incorrect English sounds. In addition, they apply Arabic main word stress rules instead of English ones, producing incorrect English stress patterns. The book also shows that English sounds and stress patterns that are both different and more marked than corresponding Arabic ones caused learning difficulties for the subjects.