Phonemic Transcription Difficulties in Learning English Diphthongs by English Major Egyptian Undergraduate Students

This study highlights the difficulties encountered by Egyptian EFL learners in transcribing English diphthongs. The main objective of this study is to identify, classify and analyze errors in phonemic transcription of English diphthongs committed by Egyptian undergraduate second year students at the department of English language and literature at Fayoum University. The study examines a total of fifty-six participants who have been randomly selected (forty students from Faculty of Arts and sixteen students from Faculty of Alsun at Fayoum University) in the academic year 2023/2024 after they have studied English phonetics with practical sessions in phonemic transcription. It adopts a mixed-approach of qualitative and quantitative techniques for data analysis. The researcher starts with qualitatively describing and analyzing the transcribed material of the written exercises of the participants inductively in order to identify their errors in transcribing English diphthongs. The qualitative analysis is followed by a quantitative analysis in order to count the frequencies of the errors committed in the data. Students’ transcription deviations have been analyzed and categorized based on Surface Structure Taxonomy (SST). The findings of this paper reveal that the frequency of error occurrence has been noted most commonly in transcribing English centring diphthongs /eǝ/ and /ɪǝ/ as well as the back closing diphthong /əʊ /. Moreover, substitution errors are predominant in the transcription test of the selected sample in which the diphthong is replaced by other diphthongs or single pure vowels due to the inconsistency between orthography and speech sounds in English.