Investigation of Phonetic and Phonological Challenges of Arabic Speaking EFL Students in the United Kingdom:

I​‌‍‍‍‌‍‍‌‌‍‌‍‍‌‌‌‍‍‍‍​ am proposing to examine syllable structure/weight, stress, and rhythm in the L2 English of Arabic speakers. I need to add some reference to literature in these areas in my proposal, including any recent studies, any of the literature on syllable structure/weight and phonotactics or on the measurement of speech rhythm, or on L2 phonology acquisition. e.g. best perceptual assimilation model 2, speech encoding model by Hufnagel and colleagues 2021, second language phonology acquisition (Monroe&…). L1 structure,, In the methodology part, I need an explanation on how I might investigate speech rhythm other than using the Kaldi Automatic Speech Recognition Toolkit to segment it, more about the data, and a plan on how to analyze it, with a bit more thought about how previous studies in this area have approached this – for example, the number of targets/tokens per participant, and the type of speech I would plan to collect (read speech, word list, etc). Once I/the Toolkit have/has segmented and labelled the spoken data, what approach I may propose to use to measure speech rhythm? What approach I may propose to use to analyze the structure of the syllables, and to syllabify the data? How may I propose to investigate the relationship between syllable weight and speech rhythm – i.e., to see whether a higher syllable weight leads to a particular rhythmic profile? The target participants​‌‍‍‍‌‍‍‌‌‍‌‍‍‌‌‌‍‍‍‍​ I need to focus on are with specific backgrounds (e.g. Jizani or Najdi) Arabic speakers (balance gender factor/ or one gender, etc). For example, there is a recent paper (Bosli & Cahill, 2022) which specifically looks at final consonant clusters in Jizani Arabic. I need to add more information on the phonology of the language spoken by the proposed participant group and how it may interact with consonant clusters in L2 English. I would also like to see acknowledgment of any issues I may face in the process of doing this research – i.e., possible research limitations. Note: – Another Toolkit has been suggested to me: WEBMAUS alignment – please see if I can use it for this research or not. – The paper discussed the interaction in the production of speech by the proposed group of speakers on the effect of syllables in English, and how they are delivering syllables in English on the speech rhythm. – There are two things going on in the proposal: – 1. how they are dealing with consonant clusters in English? – whether the complexity of the syllable they are producing contributes to differences in speech rhythm? – So based on your knowledge in this field, would it be necessary to examine CCs in EFL, If I just focused on whether syllable weight has an effect on the speech rhythm of learners of English who are speakers of Arabic? – Can the Perception aspect be a part of such rese​‌‍‍‍‌‍‍‌‌‍‌‍‍‌‌‌‍‍‍‍​arch??