Romy Ghanem

Lebanese Students Speaking English: Intelligibility of Voiced and Voiceless Word-final Consonants with Respect to Vowel Length Romy Ghanem

Vowel duration has been proven to be the most perceptible cue to the voicing of an English word-final consonant. Very little research has been conducted on Lebanese speakers? productions of such consonants and the influence that other languages, such as Arabic and French, have on these productions. This study compares English word-final voiced and voiceless consonants produced by intermediate Lebanese speakers of English to those of advanced ones. The analyses presented in this book show that there is no significant difference between the intermediate and the advanced students. Results of the conducted research also highlight the absence of significant difference between the scores given by the linguistically trained judges and those given by the non-linguistically trained panel. Further analyses of the data verify that there is no correlation between the placement of the students based on an entrance test and the ratings given by the judges on their utterances. Therefore, standardized placement tests cannot, in this case, reflect Lebanese students' actual oral proficiency in the English language.