The Effect of Gender and Native Language of the Students on the Pronunciation of the Voiced and Voiceless /th/ English Sound

Abstract

It is not beyond belief that for learners of a foreign language the pronunciation of that
language is occasionally and somehow challenging to acquire. Particularly for Iranian students
who have got different native languages in different areas of the country makes it an extremely
perplexing activity for students to acquire such languages and correct pronunciations of the
words of such languages. So there must be some factors affecting their pronunciation of such
English controversial sounds. In order to become familiar with such factors the following study
is carried on aiming at determining whether there is an association between such factors as
students’ gender and also native language regarding the correct pronunciation or
mispronunciation of the words which contain the voiced and voiceless /th/ sound for nonnative
learners of English who are Iranians with two diverse native languages, Arabic and Persian.
The statistical analysis indicated that there seemed to be no significant statistic association
between gender and correct pronunciation of the words. The results also showed that students
with Arabic native language pronounce the /th/ sound accurately and clearly in comparison to
those students whose native language is Persian, while the Persian native language students
mostly pronounce this sound incorrectly. The findings revealed that the reason that most of the
Persian native speaker students didn’t know how to pronounce this sound could be because of
the lack of this sound in their native language and accordingly they had never acquired and used
such a sound. The findings also depicted that one more significant reason which could be taken
into consideration in this regard is lack of knowledgeable teachers who model and teach the
students how to pronounce the sounds correctly.
The knowledge and acquaintance of EFL instructors, materials developers, and policy makers
with these differences may hopefully offer benefits to them in order to teach the target language
sound system in a more beneficial way and help the learners in order to better understand the
differences and provide acceptable and beneficial teaching materials for the students.