The Acquisition of an Egyptian Phonological Variant by U.S. Students in Cairo

Abstract: This study investigated the acquisition of an Egyptian phonological variant by student participants in a study abroad program at The American University in Cairo. Participants completed pre- and post-study abroad Simulated Oral Proficiency Interviews (SOPIs). The SOPI data showed a move toward an Egyptian realization of the phonological variable on the part of most participants. Furthermore, extralinguistic factors such as participant gender and status as a heritage speaker were likewise shown to influence variant choice, while factors such as length of stay abroad and word position of the target token were not shown to have a significant effect on target item realization. In contrast to other studies investigating the acquisition of target language sociolinguistic norms in the form of phonological variables in Spanish, this study found an extremely high rate of learner adoption of an Egyptian realization of this variable among learners of Arabic in Cairo.Key words: Arabic, gender, heritage status, sociolinguistic variation(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)IntroductionArabic is frequently cited as a critical language (T. A. Taha, 2007), and the number of institutions offering instruction in the language has greatly increased in recent decades (Abdalla, 2006). In spite of this rapid growth, the field of Arabic instruction continues to suffer from difficulties arising from the posited Modern Standard Arabic (MSA)/colloquial Arabic binary, typically referred to as diglossia (Ferguson, 1959). Language professionals often grapple with the issue of how much colloquial Arabic, and which kind, should be incorporated into the curriculum. The solution for many programs has been to assume that Arabic learners will simply "pick up" the dialect they need while abroad (see Ryding, 2009, and the contributions to Wahba, Taha, and England, 2014, for attempts to address this issue). Unfortunately, the field is hampered by a lack of studies that empirically investigate the processes through which adult American learners of Arabic interact with the target Arabic dialect while in a study abroad context. The current study represented an attempt to address one limited facet of Arabic learners' acquisition of the target dialect, namely learners' choice of whether to use a sociolinguistically marked local variant of a particular phoneme or to produce the nonlocal variant that is used in the vast majority of widely available Arabic instructional materials used in the United States. This specific phonological variable, referred to throughout for ease of readability as [j], can be realized in a number of ways according to the geographical Arabic dialect of a given speaker. In Egyptian Arabic, however, it is typically realized as [g].Review of LiteratureStudy Abroad and Second/Foreign Language AcquisitionThe effect of learning context on second language acquisition has proven to be a rich area for investigation in recent decades, with a large body of research focusing on the interaction between the study abroad context and a variety of areas related to second language productive skills. Although a number of researchers have found that the at-home or immersion contexts can be just as if not more strongly associated with second language gains as study abroad (D^iaz-Campos, 2004; Freed, Segalowitz, & Dewey, 2004), study abroad research has generally found a positive effect for the context in areas such as oral and written fluency(Dewey,2004;Segalowitz& Freed,2004; Serrano, Llanes, & Tragant, 2011) as well as other aspects of learner development, such as stylistic use of the language (D^iaz-Campos, 2006). Of particular relevance to the current study are studies that found a positive benefit for study abroad in learner phonological development(Mora, 2008), intonation (Henriksen,Geeslin,& Willis, 2010), and the development of learner sociolinguistic competence (Regan, 1995). …