Developing and evaluating a flipped corpus-aided English pronunciation teaching approach for pre-service teachers in Hong Kong

ABSTRACT

This study aimed to develop a corpus-aided pronunciation teacher-training programme and examine the effectiveness of a corpus-aided pronunciation teaching approach in English classrooms in Hong Kong. A workshop was conducted for 86 participants to introduce several English learner corpora. After the workshop, eight volunteer participants, pre-service teachers in Hong Kong, were paired off, entered into a seven-stage corpus-aided pronunciation teacher programme and attended interviews. One pair was selected to give a trial lesson, and 13 primary school students were invited to evaluate this lesson. The results revealed that the training provided sufficient knowledge about corpus-aided pronunciation teaching and task design. The pre-service teachers expressed a strong willingness to use corpus data as examples to raise students’ awareness of commonly mispronounced sounds. They agreed that the flipped instruction component was effective. Of the 13 primary school students, 83.33% agreed that they learned how to pronounce the target sounds correctly, and 75% were able to identify their mispronounced sounds via the corpus-aided teaching method. The findings will not only provide pre-service teachers with examples of corpus-aided pronunciation lesson plans and materials but also contribute to integrating the flipped classroom approach into teacher education programmes.

KEYWORDS:

• Flip instruction
• spoken corpora
• spoken corpora
• pronunciation teaching
• teacher education

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Education Univerity of Hong Kong: [Grant Number TDG T0200].

Notes on contributors

Hsueh Chu Chen

Chen Hsueh Chu is an Associate professor in the Department of Linguistics and Modern Language Studies, the Education University of Hong Kong.  Her research interests are inter-language phonology, experimental phonetics, corpus linguistics and computer assisted pronunciation learning.

Jing Xuan Tian

Tian Jing Xuan is currently an EdD student at the Education University of Hong Kong.