PhD Proposal The Effect of learning English in an early age on the Essay

PhD Proposal The Effect of learning English in an early age on the phonological errors in EFL Saudi classes - Essay Example his can cause a great deal of strain in the efforts to communicate in English when pronunciation is diminished because of difficulties with forming English words through a tongue that is trained to form sound within the framework of another language. Learning a second language at an earlier age may diminish this effect as the ability to form language can be more easily manipulated. Phonological errors occur when syllables are either missed or not pronounced within a communication. The forms of these errors can include, but not necessarily be limited to errors involving consonants, vowels, substitutions, additions, omissions, movements, exchanges, prosody (the metrical sound of the way that the language is formed), metathesis (the transposition of letters, sounds, or syllables), or non-contextual errors where there seems to be no definable source (Jaeger, 2005, p 147). According to Binturki (2008), the most common phonological errors that are found in Saudi speakers within their use of the English Language are with the interdentally fricative /v/ and to some degree with the /p/ and /i/. As well, the positions of certain words created difficulty form many users of the English language with the common Arabic dialect of Nadji as their primary language (p. i). The proposed study will be based upon the study done by Tiono and Yostanto (2008) on the phonological errors that were common among Indonesian speaking students when learning the English language (p. 80). The study was centrally focused on the English consonantal sounds that do not exist in the Indonesian language. The researchers identified six specific sounds that were absent in Indonesian and therefore caused difficulty for these students who had completed six courses of education in English (Tiono and Yostanto, 2008, p. 81). An auditory examination was given to 25 students from a private university in East Java, Indonesia where the phonological differences could be appreciated through listening to the