the effect of pronunciation on performing religious rituals of illiterate prayers: studying surah’s al-tawhid and al-hamd

The effect of language on culture has been an interesting issue in applied linguistics. one of the main critical domains of culturerelated language issues is pronunciation. the importance of pronunciation in some cultures is doubled when its importance goes beyond the daily use of language. many illiterate muslims in nonarab countries must perform their religious duties in accurate arabic pronunciation.  since illiterate learners can not be treated with regular and traditional educational intervention to complete this incumbent religious task, the current research has employed dynamic intervention, an approach adopted from the sociocultural theory of vygotsky (1978), for instructing a sample of these people in iran. first, the main pronunciation problems of these participants were identified. then using a native speaker’s judgment, the effect of this educational intervention was calculated in a pretestposttest design. a paired ttest was used to interpret the collected data. the findings showed that dynamic intervention has a meaningful effect on the improvement of pronunciation in the iranian illiterate participants of the study. this study could have implications for language teachers, language learners, and researchers in different fields of sociolinguistics and applied linguistics.