The Phonological Analysis of English Front Vowels in the Spoken English of Selected Undergraduates of Federal University Wukari

Abstract

This research analyses the English front vowels in the spoken English of selected undergraduates of Federal University Wukari. Therefore, 120 respondents were randomly selected. Giles and Coupland’s (Giles and Smith, 1979) Communication Accommodation Theory (CAT) and Lado’s (Lado, 1957) Contrastive Phonology Theory (CPT) were used as the theoretical frameworks. CAT was used to determine the mutual phonological intelligibility and accessibility of the respondents while CPT was used to describe the systems of languages by comparing them with others and predicting the areas of difficulties so that the second language learners can ease the difficulties. Questionnaires and read-aloud task were the research instruments used for data collection. The findings revealed that majority of the respondents found it very difficult to correctly articulate the front vowels in the test items thereby pronounced ‘veto’, ‘liberation’, ‘jeopardise’, and ‘timbre’ as [vεto], [laibireiʃɔn], [dʒεpadaiz], and [timba] instead of /ˈviːtəʊ/, /lɪbərˈeɪʃən/, /ˈdʒepədaɪz/, and /tæmbǝ/ respectively. Also, respondents’ overall performance of 21.7% shows that they had problems in articulating the English front vowels pronouncing /i:/ as [ε], /ɪ/ as [u], /e/ as [i:]; and /æ/ as [i]. Hence, recommendations were made in a bid to better ESL speakers’ pronunciation proficiency.