THE USE OF LONG VOWELS AMONG SAUDI LEARNERS

Abstract

The interest in English vowels' problems has been traced to many years ago, however, it has been observed that in EEL learning situations problems of vowels production and perception are still there. Fortunately, there is always a room for amelioration with more investigation in real language learning settings. Therefore, the attempt made in this study is to investigate the difficulties faced by EEL Saudi students in English long vowels production. It mainly examines which long vowels represent more difficulty, and whether long vowels' substitution is the most frequent in the students’ spoken performance. The participants were 10 trainee students, affiliating to the Salman bin Abdulaziz University, College of Education, Department of English. The data was collected by observation ,tabulated analyzed, and relevant studies have been discussed. The findings showed more difficulty in pure vowels resulted from relying on spelling. Both long vowels and diphthongs were shorten and substituted, due to the learners ignorance of length in English. The findings will have useful pedagogical contribution to EFL learning improvement, particularly EFL phonetics, hopefully.