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

Abstract

This research analyzes the English front vowels in the spoken English of selected undergraduates of Federal University Wukari. A total of 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 employed as theoretical frameworks. CAT was utilized to assess the mutual phonological intelligibility and accessibility of the respondents, while CPT was applied to describe language systems by comparing them with others and predicting areas of difficulty, aiding second-language learners in overcoming such challenges. Questionnaires and read-aloud tasks were the research instruments used for data collection. The findings revealed that a majority of the respondents struggled to correctly articulate the front vowels in the test items, leading to mispronunciations such as ‘veto,’ ‘liberation,’ ‘jeopardize,’ and ‘timbre’ as [vεto], [laibireiʃɔn], [dʒεpadaiz], and [timba], instead of /ˈviːtəʊ/, /lɪbərˈeɪʃən/, /ˈdʒepədaɪz/, and /tæmbə/, respectively. Furthermore, the respondents’ overall performance of 21.7% indicates significant difficulties in articulating the English front vowels, with /i:/ pronounced as [ε], /ɪ/ as [u], /e/ as [i:], and /æ/ as [i]. Consequently, recommendations were proposed to enhance the pronunciation proficiency of ESL speakers.