Investigating the Pronunciation of the English Voiceless Post-alveolar Affricate /tʃ/ among Libyan EFL Students in the Department of English at the University of Sirte

Abstract

This study investigates the ability of Libyan Arabic EFL learners to produce the English voiceless postalveolar affricate /tʃ/, which is considered a problematic sound for most Arabic learners of English. The sample of the study was fifteen Libyan EFL undergraduate students who were chosen randomly from the Department of English at Sirte University. Each participant was given nine English monosyllabic and disyllabic words containing /tʃ/ in various word positions (initially-medially-finally). The method implemented for collecting data was recorded test and data collected were analyzed descriptively using Microsoft Excel 2010. Thus, the current study adopted a quantitative case study as the research design. The results revealed that /tʃ/ sound caused trouble to this study’s students, even though all the given words were commonly used words. In spite of familiarity of the given data, the process of deaffrication of /tʃ/ occurred in the pronunciation of all participants at least for once. In other words, they pronounced /tʃ/ as /ʃ/, especially in the word-initial position followed by the word-medial while in word-final position the pronunciation for /tʃ/ was less difficult. Finally, the hypotheses of the CAH (Lado, 1957), MDH (Eckman, 1977), and SLM (Flege, 1987, 1995, 2003) were applicable to the study outcomes.