Laterals in English,Arabic and Kurdish

Iraqi Arab and Kurdish students face a number of difficulties in the perception and production of some English sounds .Among the many difficulties encountered by the students are those related to the production of lateral sounds in British English Received Pronunciation ( hereafter RP ) () These difficulties were confirmed in a production test whereby a group of fifty students(2) ( twenty Kurds and thirty Arabs) read a typed piece of conversation in which there were twenty five occurrences of lateral sounds mainly covering three allophones of/1 /viz [1][f ]and[t,].Other allophones(3)were not taken into consideration on the assumption that the greatest difficulty is encountered in the distinction -between the clear an d dark 4varieties on the one hand, and between syllabic and non- syllabic allophones on the other. The results showed that 52 % of the Kurds regularly used the clear variety where the 'dark' variety should have been used while only 40% substituted a non-syllabi c allophone for the syllabic one .On the other hand 43 % of the Arabs used a 'clear' variety instead of the 'dark' one and 75% used the non-syllabic variety instead of the syllabic .Surprisingly no student substituted a dark variety for the "clear' one except before the diphthpong/ al /, though both varieties do exist in Arabic (classical and colloquial) and in Kurdish.