A Study of Consonant Clusters in an EFL Context

Abstract

The objective of the present study was to provide answers to the questions whether Persian learners of English would have the same number of vowel insertions in the initial and final consonant clusters and also to see if the phonological system of the Persian students' mother tongue would have any effect on their learning of the pronunciation of the initial and final consonant clusters. To this end, sixty female intermediate EFL learners were administered a pronunciation test. The analysis of the participants' performances in the test showed that the number of vowel insertions they had in the initial consonant clusters was not the same as that of final consonant clusters, and using a chi square displayed that the problem of vowel insertion was found to be much more severe with initial consonant clusters as the participants highly added vowels to such clusters. Furthermore, it was found that Persian language's syllable structure does really affect the learning of consonant clusters (i.e. transfer from mother tongue).