An Analytical Study of Assimilation in English Reading Texts

Abstract

Abstract This study is concerned with analysing of assimilation as an English co-articulated phenomenon in a selected reading course assigned for Iraqi students in order to enhance the Iraqi ESL learners understanding of variety of English reading skills as well as phonology which is one of the bases of effective and successful reading. The aim of this paper is to help students overcome their problems through reading, listening and fluently pronouncing assimilated words in connected speech of English utterances for successful interaction and minimizing the Iraqi ESL students’ foreign accent. The collected data are the soundtracks of 14 reading passages taken from “Intermediate-Select Readings” /Second Edition by Linda Lee & Erik Gundersen as a second year reading textbook at the College of Languages / University of Kufa. The study analysed the data under scrutiny and found that the reciprocal assimilation is not as it is defined as adjacent sounds having mutual influence on each other to produce a third new fused sound, some features are copied just by one of them. It was also revealed that germination mostly occurs in complete assimilation when consonants in sequence are homorganic (the consonants have two features in common, manner of articulation and phonation). Since manner of articulation feature is existed in both sounds, the third place of articulation feature is copied automatically from the adjacent sound. Keywords: Assimilation, Germination, Voicing, Place, Manner, Regressive, Progressive