Statement of the Problem
A close observation of students at (SUST) disclosed that students confuse the pronunciation of some set of words
e.g. most of the English words that have sounds, which do not exist in Sudanese Spoken Arabic e.g. /p/ in
“experience” /θ/ in “thank” and /ð/ in “this”. It was also observed that students do not differentiate between some
vowel sounds which have more than one way of pronunciation e.g. the vowel in “mat” and “mate”.
The researcher spent many days at (SUST) observing the pronunciation of English words by the students at (SUST)
and the result of this observation at the university is twofold; first, it was noticed that the students have problems in the pronunciation of some English sounds for instance they confuse the
contrast sounds e.g. here are some words and how the students pronounce them next to each word (service /servais/,
document /dɔcument/, ‘women’ /wumen/, ‘obstacle’ /ɔbsteikl/, ‘performance’ /pə:fɔ:mans/ so in the first word
they used the long form instead of short form, in the second word they used /u/ instead of/ju/, in the word women
they used /u/ instead of /i/ in the word ‘performance’ they pronounced it with long vowel /ə:/ instead of short one
/ə/. So we find that they confuse different pronunciations of each vowel as if there is only one pronunciation for
each sound according to their knowledge.