Investigating Developmental Stages of Acquisition of Phonological Structures Among EFL Students of Eastern Mediterranean University: A Case Study

Subject Areas : Journal of Studies in Learning and Teaching English

Seyyed Abdollah Razavi ¹ , Mohammad Naghavi ² , Anna Hajizade ³

1 - Bandar Abbas Azad University
2 - Bandar Abbas Azad University
3 - Bandar Abbas Azad University

Received: 2013-08-12 Accepted : 2013-10-12 Published : 2013-06-01

Keywords: Phonological structures, developmental processes, Second Language Acquisition,

Abstract :

Doing a piece of research on acquisition of second language phonetics theoretically will justify the exact stages of language trans- fer and further predicts the existence of systematicity and difficulty order (Eckman, 2008). The present research is an attempt to provide new evidence for the efficacy of second language acquisition to devel- opmental stages of acquisition of phonological structures among EFL students of Eastern Mediterranean University. Accordingly, three Ira- nian EFL learners, including two males and a female studying at East- ern Mediterranean University are purposefully selected on the basis of their performance in the interview. In continuation, interviews were con- ducted three times within a range of four months with the interval of at least one month. Each interview was sound-recorded and lasted from 15 to 30 minutes. Next the pools were transcribed according to the latest conventions. Further, to ensure the ethical aspects of the research, the participants were informed about the fact that their interviews were be- ing sound recorded. At the end, it was concluded that it is not possible to monitor the developmental processes in the acquisition of phonolog- ical structures in a time span of four months and that determining a time scale for the acquisition stage was not possible.