A Contrastive Study of English and Arabic Supra-Segmental Phonemes

Abstract

This article concentrates on an interesting study of the supra-segmental phonemes of L1 and L2. A stress sign or mark has no phonemic value in Arabic; this is very different from English, which contains three common degrees or levels of word stress, that effect meaning. Stress can also joins word segments, affecting their grammatical structures. The intonation forms of pitch, too, play out differently in the two languages; in English pitch shows the difference between questions, statements, and other types of attitudes and utterance that refer to phonological features. Arab students often have great difficulty with stress placement, unstressed vowels such as ,the schwa /ə/, and syllable boundary. These supra-segmental phonemes differences are the cause of difficulties for beginning learners. In classrooms, it is easy for teachers to follow students’ speech and identify their problem areas. This experimental study followed a sample of 50 female first-year students at Majmaah University in their acquisition of skills in rendering English supra-segmental phonemes. Oral pre- and post-tests were used for data collection, following an interview questions/ and answer formats. While participant spoke, examiners focused on the tested areas and assigned scores according to each participants’ answer. The findings indicate that, FL beginner learners commonly misinterpret supra-segmental phonemes.