Posters

Progress Testing After Two-Semester Pronunciation Instruction: Spelling-Pronunciation

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Abstract

The primary aim of this study is to determine whether English Department students’ pronunciation progressed during a one-year course of practical and theoretical phonetic instruction and, if so, to verify in what respects. A second intention was to discover what problems still remain despite the course. A self-designed diagnostic test was administered to 91 first-year students at the beginning (pre-test) and at the end of the course (post-test). The word-reading exercise encompassed 35 lexemes (43 aspects) that exhibited a variety of difficulties, including problematic letters, e.g. in oven versus protein, in charlatan versus archives and words commonly mispronounced (ancient) together with examples showing frequent word-stress misplacement (purchase). The sentence-reading task (30 elements) comprised: weak forms, contractions (mustn’t), a selection of ‘trap’ words (dough), words with difficult word stress (determined) and rendition of verb forms. This evidence-based testing method suggests that the one-year course is beneficial because it leads to the participants making overall progress (r = 0.71 for word-reading, r = 0.75 for sentence reading in pre-test and post-test). It also shows that contracted forms and some phonetically challenging words (area, purchase, Niagara) still call for attention.

How to Cite:

Nowacka, M., (2018) “Progress Testing After Two-Semester Pronunciation Instruction: Spelling-Pronunciation”, Pronunciation in Second Language Learning and Teaching Proceedings 10(1).