A spectrographic analysis of English dental fricatives production among Iban and Sarawak Malay ESL learners

This study examines the production of dental fricatives in the English pronunciation of the Ibans and Sarawak Malays ESL learners. The study describes the realisation of the target sounds across word-initial, word-medial and word-final positions and compares selected learner productions with those of a British English reference speaker. Although previous studies have examined dental fricative production among learners from various first-language backgrounds, little research has focused on Iban and Sarawak Malay ESL learners. This study addresses this gap by analysing the production of English dental fricatives among Iban and Sarawak Malay ESL learners. Speech data were collected from ten female ESL learners (five Iban and five Sarawak Malay speakers). Participants completed a controlled pronunciation task using visual and textual prompts to elicit target words. The recordings were analysed spectrographically using PRAAT (Version 6.2.22) through spectrographic analysis. The findings indicate that both learner groups commonly substituted/θ/with the alveolar stop/t/and the labiodental fricative/f/, while/ð/was predominantly realised as the alveolar stop/d/. These findings contribute to understanding L1 phonological transfer among underrepresented Malaysian ESL learners and offer insights for English pronunciation instruction.