| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立清華大學 === 外國語文學系 === 91 === The traditional way of teaching English pronunciation focuses on individual sounds ─ vowels and consonants; however, studies in Chinese EFL learners’ pronunciation show that though many learners have fairly good pronunciation of individual sounds, their speaking of English sounds unnatural and sometimes even not understandable (Chen, Fan, & Lin, 1996; Kuo, Chiang, & Wang, 2000). In addition, other studies also indicated that rhythm is the most important factor for judging a good pronunciation (Anderson-Hsieh, Johnson, & Koehler, 1992). These findings arouse my interest in investigating whether or not the pronunciation instruction with a focus on English rhythm can improve Chinese EFL learners’ pronunciation.
In this study, there were 70 senior high school students at intermediate proficiency level participating in the study. 32 students in the experimental group received pronunciation instruction with a focus on English rhythm while 38 students in the control group received pronunciation instruction with a focus on English consonants and vowels. The participants in the experimental group received 10 to 15 minutes pronunciation instruction in each period, four periods a week. The pronunciation instruction in the control group received the same amount of time as the experimental group, and the duration of the experiment was 10 weeks consecutively.
The pre-test and post-test reading material included four major categories: a list of English words, phrases, sentences and a passage, and all speech samples were submitted to five native speakers for the impressionistic evaluation of students’ pronunciation.
Results showed that (1) the participants in the experimental group made statistically significant progress in their overall performance, especially in the Word List and Passage Reading tasks, (2) lower proficiency learners in the experimental group made significant progress in overall pronunciation performance whereas higher proficiency learners showed the least improvement; however, no significant improvement was found in the control group, and (3) male participants in the experimental group progressed significantly better than females; however, there was no significant improvement found for both females and males in the group that received segmental instruction.
The results of the study provided a close investigation of the effect of different types of pronunciation teaching and implications for EFL teachers for the effective pronunciation instruction as well as directions for future studies.
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