learners. Accordingly, the whole language learning process is better seen as a personalized experience, and learners can monitor their own progress and errors outside the school context, assess their own level of proficiency, and target the less developed features in their L2. At present, learners can make use of the unlimited access to pure L2 input from social media websites and even live communication with native speakers. Following an Informal Digital Learning of English (IDLE), EFL learners can benefit from the available dataset specified for such purposes and available online for EFL practice. In this relation, PA EFL learners are recommended to record themselves speaking in the L2 and then to listen and assess their own production of vowels and other segmental and suprasegmental features.
This thesis also produced some interesting findings that need further examination in the future. For example, a more detailed analysis of the pairwise boundaries between the 11 AE monophthongs in perception and production would allow me to determine the shape of the crossover between neighboring vowels. The results in Chapter 4 show the acceptability regions of all 11 AE monophthongs (the ellipses) that were obtained for L1 and L2 listeners. This has not been done before. In the literature, one normally finds stimulus continua between two (maximally three) sounds but never an exhaustively and systematically sampled vowel space.
It should be feasible to break this dissertation results down into a large number of pairwise contrasts between adjacent vowels and from that determine the exact shape of the crossover between neighboring vowels. By doing so, I will find not only that the boundaries in the L2 data are not at the same location in the vowel space as in the L1 data but also that the L2 crossover is shallower (more gradual, i.e., less sharply defined – meaning that the L2 listeners are less certain of their identification) than in the L1 data.
It is my hope that this dissertation (and future research) will contribute to alleviating the lamentable conditions for teaching English in the Palestinian school system and raising it up to a higher level.
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