دور الأنشطة التعليمية الواضحة في تمييز طلاب الجامعة بين الصوتين /p/ و /b/

Abstract

Every language has its own phonetic inventory. Hence, learning the pronunciation of any new language, in our case English as a Foreign language, can be a challenging task as there are some sounds that are difficult to pronounce and are almost completely unrelated to any sounds that learners already familiar with. Also, the application of incorrect phonological patterns when speaking or reading results in quite unnatural sounds. Such a problematic has to be attended to from the beginning of learners' learning to ease the learning process and minimize the challenges that may be encountered throughout this process.

The current research aims to help the students overcome the difficulty of not distinguishing between the sounds /p/ and /b/ which may result in changing the meaning of the words. It hypothesizes that such a difficulty can be overcome by developing students' phonological and phonemic awareness by teaching them explicitly some activities that may positively lessens the problem of wrong pronunciation and achieve better performance.

Accordingly, and to apply the preceding problematic issue to the sound /p/ which does not exist in Arabic language, 400 number of first year students, English Department, College of Education for Humanities, University of Mosul, were tested by listening to individual and contrasted words, reading a text containing words with the sounds /p/ and /b/, and then, as a group,  telling a story with the use of the suggested words. 40 students were found out to have the problem of replacing the sound /p/ by the sound /b/ in the initial,  medial or final positions of the words. On this basis, the students were divided into two groups, control and experimental and were differently  taught. The findings indicate the experimental group achieved better than the control group as it was taught according to the explicit method by Schmitt (2010) that has been adopted as a model in the current study