Examining the role of explicit phonetic instruction in native-like and comprehensible pronunciation development: an instructed SLA approach to L2 phonology

Abstract

This paper reports on an instructed second language acquisition study that investigated the effects of explicit phonetic instruction on second language pronunciation by adopting two different outcome measurements (i.e. a rubric of accentedness as well as comprehensibility). Twenty native Japanese learners of English in ESL (English as a second language) settings participated in the current study and were randomly assigned to the experimental group and the control group. After they received four-hour instruction with the target pronunciation features of English-specific segmentals/æ,f,v,θ,ð,w,l,/, the comprehensibility and perceived foreign accent of the participants’ oral production in English were evaluated by four native English listeners. Results suggested that explicit instruction had a significant effect on comprehensibility especially in the sentence-reading task, although a significant reduction in foreign accent was not obtained in any contexts.

Keywords:

• pronunciation
• second language learning
• intervention
• intelligibility

Acknowledgements

Parts of this study were presented at the annual meeting of the Interfaces of Intelligent Computer-Assisted Language Learning in Waterloo, Ontario, on December 8, 2007, and at Georgetown University Round Table in Washington DC on March 13, 2009. I gratefully acknowledge Roy Lyster, Kim van Poeteren, Talia Issac, and anonymous Language Awareness reviewers for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this article.

Notes

1. Note that these eight English-specific sounds were also identified as most important pronunciation features to teach by 48 experienced NJ English teachers belonging to a private language school located in Tokyo (Saito, 2009).

2. Out of the 10 participants in the experimental group, two students received instruction in pairs, because they were friends with each other and preferred to do so rather than in a one-on-one meeting. As an instructor, I did not observe any significant difference in the amount and quality of instruction they received compared with the other students who received tutored instruction individually.