LA CRISIS DE LA DEUDA

The group interviews and discussions that took place before and after the tests and during the training lessons aimed to elicit from the participants their views on comprehending unfamiliar dialectal words and specifically on the difficulties they face and the strategies they believe they apply in order to decode unfamiliar lexis. The interviews also tried to unveil the participants’ views of the training they received. The following are the emergent themes of the interviews:

9.1.5.1 The importance of learning about the pronunciation rules and the corresponding sounds in the Arabic varieties

All the participants stressed that learning about the corresponding sounds in the dialects helped them to guess unfamiliar dialectal words. This was clear in the pre- test as none of the participants – except for P1 - managed to recognise that the

56 72 41 62 29 50 75 97 38 50 0 20 40 60 80 100 120 Pre-test Post-test Content roots Pronouns prepositions negations tense/number identifiers

Gulf word rāyil-ha “her man” is a cognate of rajuli-ha in MSA and ragil-ha in the Egyptian dialect due to their unfamiliarity with the glide /j/ in the Gulf dialects being a corresponding sound to /ʤ/ in MSA. Another example from the Gulf dialect was the sound /ʧ/ being a corresponding phoneme to the /k/ in MSA. This was known to P4 and P5 who managed in the pre-test to recognise that the word simach “fish” is a cognate of samak in MSA. They said that although they have not been exposed to the Gulf dialects and they had never heard the word simach before, they were aware that the /k/ sound can change to a /ʧ/ in some Arabic dialects and that is how they guessed the correct meaning of the word. P2 and P3 expressed the view that if they had also known about the /ʧ/ sound, they might have been able to guess the correct meaning.

In order to examine their statement about the usefulness of learning the pronunciation system of the dialects, a comparison of their results was made looking at all the Gulf words correctly translated with the corresponding sound y in both tests. The analysis found only 1 (13%) correct response out of 8 in the pre- test by the four participants while after learning about the Gulf pronunciation system, these increased in the post-test to 9 (75%) correct responses out of 12 in the words that contained the corresponding /j/ sound.

9.1.5.2 Combining morphemes in the dialects

The participants stated that one of the most difficult linguistic features they found when they started learning a dialect was multi-morphemic words as they differ from their cognates in MSA in syllabic stress and in how the morphemes are connected to each other to make one long word that is often hard to segment. P2 – who had stated that she can speak and understand the Egyptian dialect quite well – said that it took her a long time before she was able to segment and recognise the affixes in Egyptian multi-morphemic words.

9.1.5.3 Linking between the unfamiliar and the familiar varieties

All the participants stated that when they listen to an unfamiliar dialect, they try to link the words they hear to what they already know in MSA or in other familiar dialects, but they also said that this strategy does not always work and sometimes it causes frustration when what they think they hear is not comprehensible. In

analysing their answers in the pre-test, there were 10 instances in which they clearly depended on their knowledge of the Egyptian dialect41 in order to try and guess the meaning of words in the unfamiliar varieties which sometimes did not result into a correct recognition. Example (1) below has a Saudi sentence from the pre-test which was translated by P4 as “we talked and went to the mountain”; in this example, P4 did not pair the Saudi word gabl with its cognate in MSA qabla but with the Egyptian word gabal “mountain”.

(1) Saudi = kallamn-āh gabl ma-nrūḥ

called/talked(1st p. pl.)-him before that-go(1st p. pl.) ‘We talked to/called him before going’

MSA = kallamn-āhu qabla an naḏhaba

Another instance of how the participants relied on their knowledge of the Egyptian dialect in decoding unfamiliar words is in example (2) from the pre-test which has the Gulf interrogative chēf “how” - a cognate of kayfa in MSA. P2 – who did not know about the corresponding sound ch to the MSA k, translated the sentence as “Look …..the house” through pairing the word chēf “how” with the Egyptian word šūf42 _“look”.

(2) Gulf = chēf rāḥ al-bēt?

how went(3rd p.m.) the-house ‘How did he go home?’ MSA = kayfa ḏahaba ila-al-bayti?

41 As was presented in table 8.1 in chapter 8, the Egyptian dialect was the one dialect that all the participants had a variable knowledge of because they spent all/part of their year abroad in Egypt.

9.1.5.4 The effectiveness of the strategy training

All the participants reported that they found the training very useful; even P1 who attended only one out of the three hours of training, commented that it was a useful reminder but she stated she already applies these strategies when listening to a variety of dialects and therefore chose not to attend further hours. P2 and P5 stated that more exposure to the dialects would have made the training more useful. P2 said in a correspondence after the post-test:

The second test felt easier than the first one we did, but there are still a few gaps... I feel like I need to listen to more Kuwaiti and Saudi speakers.

P3 commented that she found learning about the pronunciation rules and the corresponding sounds in the dialects was the most useful aspect of the training she received; she said:

I found the whole experience really interesting and enjoyable! I definitely noticed that I am already more aware of what to listen out for in the words I don't quite understand the first time around! I really enjoyed the training, so thanks so much for asking me to help out with this!! … I think learning about the pronunciation differences was the most useful part of it; when I listened to [P1] talking in Emirati Arabic, it sounded alien like another language, but now I can get more of what she says.

P4 said that he believes that if more contexts were available for the sentences in the test, he would have achieved higher scores. He also questioned the

effectiveness of the training for recognising lexis in more linguistically distant varieties such as the Moroccan or the Yemeni dialects.