THE PRODUCTION OF ENGLISH CONSONANT CLUSTERS BY BAHDINI KURDISH LEARNERS OF ENGLISH

Abstract

The present study investigated the production of English consonant clusters (CCs) by Bahdini Kurdish (BK) learners of English. It examinedwhether there was an improvement in the production of CCs of 4^th year students in comparison to that of 2^nd year and it further identifiedthe types of CCs that were problematic for both2^nd and 4^th year students. The study was based on a production test composed of 40 words. The words were produced by 50 undergraduate students from College of Languages, Duhok University purposively selected from the 2^ndand 4^thyears of their study. From each level, twenty-five students were taken and their ages ranged between 20 and 23. The respondents were asked to read the whole wordlist aloud and their production was recorded. The data was transcribed using the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) symbols and were listened to by the researcher and two phonologists to indicate the correct/incorrectCCsproduction in their performance. The findings revealed thatBK learners of English, in general, were able to produce CCs correctly with a high rate. However, the rate of correct production got decreased significantly with the increase of the number of consonants in the cluster. Furthermore, the production of all patterns of CCs by the 4^th year students was better compared to that of the 2^nd year students. Finally, the study showed that transfer was the major factor for the incorrect rate of the production of English CCs by BK learners. This was mainly due to the differences of the syllable structure between Kurdish and English, lack of enough knowledge in the field of phonetics and phonology as well as lack of practicing CCs in their daily life.