Author(s): AHMAD FAWAD NOORZADAH*
The purpose of current study is to realize why Afghan Dari EFL learners have difficulty in pronouncing English /th/ digraph correctly. After a proficiency test, 24 Afghan Dari EFL learners were interviewed on the basis of their gender, age, proficiency level, and accuracy and respectively the data analyzed for further investigation to look whether voiced or voiceless dental fricative is more problematic. In fact, the data analysis enabled us to conclude that both voiced and voiceless dental fricatives are challenging for Afghan Dari EFL learners, but voiceless seems to be more problematic because while 92% of the voiced sound was articulated correctly, only 8% was articulated incorrectly; whereas; 61% of voiceless sound was articulated correctly, and 39% was articulated incorrectly. In addition, some factors such as age, duration of study, gender, and proficiency level of the participants seem to have an impact on the production of these phonemes. The main reason why English /th/ digraph is problematic for Afghan Dari EFL learner is that there is no corresponding sound in Dari language; therefore, Dari EFL learners substitute these sounds by close equivalent sounds in Dari language; specifically, they replace voiced dental fricative with /d/ or /?/ and voiceless dental fricative with /s/ or /?/. We suggest some further extensive investigations on this topic for more clarification in order to scrutinize and cure this fossilized pronunciation problem of Dari learners of English.
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