Abstract:
This paper elaborates on Persian and English orthographic shared aspects to study the
effects of L1 Persian on learning English as a foreign language. While there are some
examples of letter/sound mismatches in the orthographic system of both languages,
those of English are more complex than Persian. In order to see the effect of the
mismatch between orthography and transcription, 40 Persian EFL learners were
divided into two proficiency groups i.e., advanced and elementary, and their
performance was examined on comprehension and production tasks. The learners’
production skills were checked via a list of 76 pseudo words requiring the learners to
read them while their voices were recorded. After a week time interval, a
comprehension test consisting of 34 items was administered, requiring the learners to
listen and choose among the orthographic forms presented to them. It was
hypothesized that being educated in L1 Persian, comprising semi-opaque orthography
system, the learners would tackle the English opaque graphemes better on the
mismatches. However, it was observed that both elementary and advanced groups had
difficulty learning English orthography system, showing almost no positive effect from
L1. Only in rare cases did more proficient learners perform better due to more
schooling education in English.
Machine summary:
Many experiments have been conducted to study how many of the disabilities in various languages are related to orthographic characteristics (Cossu, Shankweiler, Liberman, Tola, & Katz, 1988; Goswami, Gombert, & Barrera, 1998).
In this regard, Persian occupies somewhere in the middle towards the shallow end of the continuum (Haghshenas, 1356; Samareh, 1366; Jabbari, 2005) This study investigates the comprehension and production of some sounds and their graphemes within shared features of English and Persian orthographic system by Iranian EFL learners.
3. Data Analysis and Results To investigate the effect of Persian L1 orthographic system on the comprehension and production of English L2 pseudo words by thetwo groups of learners, the researcher analyzed the data via a mixed between-within analysis of variance.
09, there was a significant effect for proficiency in the comprehension task (1b), Wilk's Iranian Journal of Applied Language Studies,Vol 6, No 1, 2014 Lambda=.
169 Bonferroni pair wise comparisons indicated that there was a substantial main effect for the production of sound /s/ in the reading task and comprehension of grapheme [s] in the comprehension test, leading these two options to be selected significantly more frequently than the other choices.
034 Similar to tasks 1a and 1b, the within group effect variable orthography was significant in both production and comprehension tasks (p Iranian Journal of Applied Language Studies,Vol 6, No 1, 2014 Table 5.
293 Furthermore, Bonferroni pair-wise comparisons indicated that there was a substantial main effect for all sounds in production, but in the comprehension test only grapheme [s] was significantly different from both options.