A study of the Distributional Peculiarity of /l/ Allophony for Advanced Iraqi Girl Students at Teachers preparatory Institute

A Contrastive Experimental Analysis

الملخص

The purpose of this paper is to argue that not all learners' errors in
L2 are necessarily the result of their L1 interference. In fact, many of
these errors may be attributed to reasons other than the make-up of
their L1. This argument is applied to the advanced Iraqi student
teachers' (AIST) errors in the distributional allophony of /l/. The
results obtained show that the learners' errors are the result of:
- Analogy, i.e. applying L2 patterns into areas in which they cannot
be applied.
- Habitual mistakes; those which are so strongly fossilized from an
early age that cannot be easily corrected later.
- Systematic resistance to L1 patterns which correspond to L2 ones.
- Vocabulary problems resulting in whole-word mispronunciations.
Such reasons and others are found to be behind learners' errors as
regards this allophony, which in the light of the study is meant to
analyze the subjects' performance of a chosen material depending on
the contrastive analysis (CA) results. The study also presents
suggestions to solve some of these problems.
The experimental procedures are carried out depending on the
voluntary participation of the fifth-year students, Dept. of English in
the Teacher Training Institute/ Nineveh of the academic year
2012-2013.