Abstract:

This project aims to develop a teaching and learning tool that will help students improve critical aspects of their pronunciation in English by using existing technology in an innovative way. It examines the effectiveness of adapting the speech-analysis software Praat to provide visual feedback in pronunciation instruction for students to improve perception and articulation of key English vowels. In particular, it targets improvements in students’ pronunciation accuracy of diphthongs and the unstressed vowel [ə], which are challenging for them, while potentially impeding comprehension for listeners. In order to investigate whether visual feedback can help students improve their pronunciation accuracy of these vowels, a pretest-posttest protocol will be administered to an experimental group receiving both visual and verbal feedback (training) and a control group receiving verbal feedback only. Improvements in pronunciation accuracy of the targeted vowels will be determined by acoustic analysis and native-speaker judgements as well as interviews with the participants. There is considerable potential for this adaptation to be used by teachers in the classroom and tutors in the Self-Access Language Learning (SALL) Centre.