This study investigated primary teachers’ knowledge of pronunciation instruction, and its manifestation in classroom practices in Korean EFL contexts. To this end, the questionnaire data collected from 47 teachers were quantitatively analyzed. The emerging themes from 5 teachers’ interviews were qualitatively analyzed, based on content analysis. Findings revealed that they had an appropriate knowledge base of pronunciation teaching, equipped with the better understanding of content knowledge (CK), followed by pedagogical content knowledge (PCK), and technical pedagogical content knowledge (TPACK). No statistically significant difference was found in teachers’ knowledge between males and females, and also between the 4 groups with different teaching experience. They manifested their knowledge mainly acquired from the past course lectures into classroom practices, employing controlled and free practices such as listening and repeating, shadowing, songs, chants, games, and role play, including different types of corrective feedback. Most notably, they integrated role play effectively into classroom practices to improve young learners’ pronunciation in interestprovoking and enjoyable ways.
This study investigated the extent to which explicit and implicit instruction improve L1-Arabic speakers’ articulation of English words whose cognates were acquired earlier in their L2 French. Sixty-eight secondary school students, explicit (n=35) and implicit (n=33), participated in a programme incorporating focus-on-pronunciation activities, comprising three 45-minute sessions. Their learning motivation was first rated using an adapted version of Attitude/Motivation Test Battery (AMTB). Their pronunciation improvement was assessed through an oral-reading task. Ten new words were included in the post-test to see if they would generalize the instructed knowledge analogically. Results indicated that both explicit and implicit instruction had a positive impact on the students’ pronunciation advancement. However, the explicit group outperformed the implicit group with both the targeted and untaught words. There was insignificant interaction effect between instructional method and students’ motivation level, with higher motivation uniformly enhancing the effect of instruction. Nevertheless, motivation played a more crucial role in the learnt knowledge transferability when instruction was of implicit.
This paper accommodates EIL(English as an international language) together with EFL in English pronunciation teaching and learning. In recognizing EIL, I suggest three strategic levels for phonological norms in assessing leaners’ pronunciation: the level P(phonemic) as a mandatory level to achieve, the level NLA(native language accent) as a cautious level to suppress the native accent, and the level TLA(target language accent) as a desirable level to accomplish a "native-like" accent. After probing the significance of each level, the paper addresses the issue of learning patterns depending on different proficiency levels, together with the effect of formal instruction. The sounds under investigation are English /l/, /r/, and /si/ for the level P, Korean Nasalization and Lateralization for the level NLA, and English /p, t, k/ for the level TLA. Two groups of local college sophomores served as experimental subjects, one as an intermediate group and the other as beginners group. The correctness rate for each level turned out to be the level TLA the lowest(14.21%~ 22.22%), the level NLA the next (49.37%~57.95%), and the level P the highest(66.47%~74.08%). The level TLA achieved the highest effect of formal instruction(13.30%), and the other two levels achieved less effect(5.69%~5.79%). In the level NLA, three factors that affect native interference are suggested: familiarity, syntactic distance, and the length of previous vowels. It is argued that the lowest correctness rate of the level TLA is less alarmimg than the low number indicates, while the level P is more demanding to overcome regardless of the highest correctness rate in regard to effective communication in English.