TY - JOUR ID - TI - A Study of the Pronunciation of Iraqi Announcers of news in English (thesis Phd) دراسة نطق مذیعی الأخبار باللغة الإنجلیزیة (اطروحة دکتوراه) AU - Asma Ameen Huseen اسماء امین حسین AU - Abas Juda Rahim عباس جودة رحیم PY - 2004 VL - 34 IS - 38 SP - 348 EP - 349 JO - Adab AL Rafidayn اداب الرافدين SN - 03782867 26642506 AB - With the growing concern for the importance of language in today’s world, there has been an equivalently growing need for communicating it in the most effective way. This study is concerned with pronunciation as an aspect which has the potential to reflect the beauty of language and the efficiency of its speaker.Pronunciation in this study is examined in connection with a limited group of speakers, namely television announcers of news in English and hence the difference from previous studies. For whereas the pervious studies have taken the pronunciation problems and/or errors in connection with Iraqi beginning, intermediate, and/or semi-advanced learners of English, the present study focuses on such errors as produced by speakers, who by virtue of their profession as news announcers are supposedly at a very advanced level of knowledge of the English language and the workings of its sound system. Therefore, the main objective of this study has been to describe and analyse these errors, and to locate their sources in an attempt to specify the incentive for preventing their occurrence.The study has been developed in the light of the hypotheses that spelling and phonological interference are the major reasons behind the pronunciation errors made by the announcers. On the segmental level, the erroneous pronuniation of consonants and vowels is particularly caused by the written representation of the sounds (i.e. their spelling), which accounts for the frequently occurring spelling pronunciations in the data. On the suprasegmental level on the other hand, the errors of syllabification, stress, and intonation are especially invoked by the influence of the phonological system of Arabic. Of the two types of error, the suprasegmental errors are more threatening to intelligibility than the segmental ones.Being characteristically unlikely in news broadcasts. the recurrence of errors in the pronunciation of announcers has to be reduced to a minimum. This, as recommended by the work, can only be achieved by subjecting the announcers-to-be to intensive specialized language programmes that are supervised by native English speaking expertise.The study falls into five chapters. chapter One serves as an introduction to the whole work. It states the problem, the aims of the study, and the main hypotheses.Due to the strong relevance of the notion of foreign accent to the purpose of the study, Chapter Two is devoted to presening a detailed account of the notion, projecting its negative impact on the judgement of the native speaker, and presenting the main factors that belie its emergence, namely the learner’s attitude, the age-dominated critical period, and the phonological and graphological interference of the mother tongue.Chapter Three, which provided a general background to the major aspects of the sound systems of English and Arabic, is devoted to presenting the relatedliterature of the phonologies of the two languages. Certain areas are compared, and learning difficulties are specified at both the segmental and the suprasegmental levels.Chapter Four is devoted to the analysis and discussion of the data which consists of a large corpus of news bulletins recorded from Iraq Television over a span of two years, from 2001, to 2003.Finally, built on the analysis of the data. Chapter Five presents the findings of the study, together with some recommendations and suggestions for future research.

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