서강대학교

초록/요약

There are many passionate EFL learners in Korea and many of them are adults. One of their language barriers is an accurate pronunciation and it is not a trivial matter. In TESOL, there are numerous research papers in regards to pronunciation instruction. Various pronunciation instruction methods have been introduced: among them all, listening-and-speaking method seems to have frequently been chosen by many practitioners so far. Based on several journal articles and the result of this survey, it was found that many adult learners still need to learn English pronunciation but actual pronunciation teaching is not often done in EFL classes. Thus, to ascertain how effective the pronunciation rule teaching is the motivation of this study. 10 core pronunciation rules introduced by Yoo (2011) were used in this experiment. In this study, two groups of participants were selected. They are two-year college students majoring in tourism. The total duration of this study is 10 weeks. Before and after this study, each participant was asked to take a pretest and a posttest. Their recordings were rated by two native English speakers. Based on the results from the experiment, this study implies some aspects as follows. First, the effect of pronunciation instruction using 10 core rules does not seem considerable even though there was improvement in their pronunciation. It is assumed that the experiment time was not enough. It was done 25 minutes a week for 10 weeks. If the subjects had spent more time practice pronunciation in class, they would have improved their pronunciation more. Generally, the more students spend time in learning, the faster they can improve. Based on the survey result, there can be less important rules for pronunciation learning. They answered some rules are not very useful to their speaking and/or listening. In the future research, some other pronunciation rules will be adopted to pronunciation teaching. Before conducting a research in the future, a survey or an interview regarding useful pronunciation rules need to be performed. Then, participants in the future research will show more improvement in an experiment on pronunciation instruction.