Undergraduates’ Ability to Identify the English Liquids /r/ and /l/ at Word-Initial

Abstract

A good listening ability helps the listener to comprehensively obtain information while conversing with their interlocutor, and it also enhances successful communication. Contrastively, misunderstanding and misinterpretation of the received messages due to the lack of a good listening ability causes communication breakdowns. A poor English listening ability may be resulted from learners’ incapability to distinguish certain sounds that share some phonological aspects such as the liquids /r/ and /l/. Consequently, this research was conducted to investigate the English as Foreign Language (EFL) undergraduates’ ability to identify the English liquids /r/ and /l/ at word-initial. The participants were 60 freshmen who took the “GEBLC101: English for Everyday Communication” course in the first semester in the Academic Year 2018 at Rajamangala University of Technology Lanna (RMUTL) Phitsanulok, and they were purposively selected. The research instruments were a listening test and a questionnaire asking for the participants’ personal information. The listening test contained 40 randomly-organized minimal-pair English words with 20 words starting with the liquid /r/ and 20 words starting with the liquid /l/. The obtained data were statistically analyzed to find the mean score and percentage. The results of the study revealed that, overall, the participants could correctly identify the initial liquid /r/ and /l/. When further studied the ability to identify the liquids /r/ and /l/ at word-initial of the participants from each faculty, it found that the percentages of the Business Administration and Liberal Arts (BALA) (66%) and Science and Agricultural Technology (SAT) (64.25%) participants who correctly identify the initial liquid /r/ were nearly the same. The Engineering (ENG) participants showed the lowest ability to correctly identify the same sound with a percentage of 59.75%. The percentages of the BALA (55.25%), SAT (46%), and ENG (50.35%) participants who correctly identified the initial liquid /l/ were slightly different. It could be concluded that undergraduates from RMUTL Phitsanulok demonstrate a fairly good ability to identify the initial liquids /r/ and /l/; however, some participants could not perform the identification task well. It is recommended that EFL lecturers put more effort to encourage EFL undergraduates to do more listening practices, so their sound segment identification ability will be improved and their listening comprehension ability will, in turn, be better.