Challenges in Pronouncing English Inflectional Morphemes among Students at the Faculty of Education in Ghat, Libya: A Study on –ed and –s Pronunciation

الملخص

This study investigates the pronunciation of English inflectional morphemes by students studying the English language in the Faculty of Education, Ghat, Libya. The study focused on pronouncing -ed in regular past simple, -s in third person singular present tense, and -s in regular plurals. The study attempted to identify common patterns and challenges among these students. Data were collected from a phonetic analysis of 15 English language students during a recorded pronunciation test. The test consists of three categories. Each category represents one morpheme (-ed past simple, -s present tense, and -s regular plurals), and there are 18 words, with an equal number of words representing the three variations in each category. Analysis revealed that students of the English language at the Faculty of Education in Ghat struggle with pronouncing the inflectional morpheme "-ed" in regular past tense verbs, compared to "-s" in plurals and third-person singular present verbs. They have good phonological awareness about the suffix "s" pronunciation rules but often pronounce "-ed" incorrectly due to confusion in grapheme-phoneme correspondence and insertion of /ɪ/ before /d/, which also causes inaccuracy in pronouncing the -s morpheme.