The Impact of Qur'anic Tajweed Rules on the Enunciation of Preschool Children's English

Document Type : Academic research papers

Author

Department of English Language and Literature, Faculty of Women for Arts, Science and Education, Ain Shams University.

Abstract

Although there is no shortage of research relating to child language acquisition (Lust, 2006,Lyon, 1996; Rauch, 2003)or research concerning the sounds of the Glorious Qur'an (Torki& Tabatabaei,2017; Zaid, 2011),studying the acquisition of correct pronunciation of English in relation to learning Tajweed rules of Qur'an is something novel and has not been previously studied. This is a gap this paper intends to fill. A similar concept was introduced by Nordin and Yunus (2020) who studied enhancement of Standard English accent in Malaysian primary school students, where 15 Khotimul Quran students were chosen alongside 15 common students to study patterns of stress, intonation and rhythm in their spoken English. The current study recruited 12 preschool children; where nine constituted the control group and three the experimental group. The reason for the misalignment in numbers regarding the two groups is due to the fact that students dropped out during the course of the sessions, and were therefore not considered in the results. The experimental group were exposed to sessions of Qur'anic recitation while the two groups, both control and experimental, took English sessions focusing on word-final assimilation of /n/ in connected speech. This paper explores the above through autosegmental theory and by studying analyses of sound files done by the software, Praat. It was found from the spectrogram data that the group undergoing Qur'anic intervention produced more instances of total assimilation; this suggests that being exposed to Qur'anic Tajweed does, in fact, influence English pronunciation.

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Buhūth
Volume 1, Issue 8
Issue Eight, Part Three - Languages and Literature
August 2021
Pages 27-58

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