Teaching Pronunciation with Computer Assisted Pronunciation Instruction in a Technological University

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to evaluate the effectiveness of computer assisted pronunciation instruction in English pronunciation for students in vocational colleges and universities in Taiwan. The participants were fifty-one first-year undergraduate students from a technological university located in central Taiwan. The participants received an eight-week pronunciation instruction, in which the participants were presented model utterances and corresponding pitch contours of target sentences and then practiced pronunciation of target sentences with computer assisted pronunciation training software. Computerized speaking tests were conducted before, during, and after the training to measure the improvement of pronunciation quality, and a questionnaire was administered at the end of the instruction. The results of repeated measures analysis of variance on the scores of the tests indicate that the pronunciation quality of the participants was significantly improved. The results of this study provide empirical evidence in teaching pronunciation to vocational college students with computer technology. 1. Background/ Objectives and Goals Taiwanese people's English proficiency level is unsatisfactory to face the international competitions and challenge in the global village era, according to several recent reports of standardized English proficiency tests and survey of adult English ability. For example, Education Testing Service (ETS) reported that Taiwanese examinees of global TOEFL in 2012 had only scored averaged 78 points, which was lower than global average and ranked 20 among 30 Asian countries [1]. It is worth noting that both the scores in speaking and writing were ranked 21, lower than those in reading (ranked 9) and listening (ranked 13). The reasons of Taiwanese's poor speaking skills are manifold. Cappelle and Curtis [2] pointed out that, among the four language skills, the listening and speaking skills of Asian English learners are weakest even though the two skills are fundamental in communication. In Taiwan, English-as-Foreign Language (EFL) classes are mostly teacher-centered by employing Grammar-Translation method, which stresses on the importance of vocabulary and grammatical structures with little attention given to the spoken form of the language [3][4]. This approach resulted in the class activities of Taiwan EFL classes which focus on the word-decoding, the phonetic identification, and the grammar drills [5][6]. Consequently, speaking skills and competence of communication in different contexts are not the focus of English language teaching objectives [7] and there is little English listening and speaking instruction in Taiwan's high schools (Yao as cited in [8]). When students enroll in colleges and universities, they may have better vocabulary and grammar knowledge, but their listening and speaking skills are inadequate. Some studies on the oral skills and communicative competence of undergraduate students in Taiwan have been conducted over the past years. A survey conducted by [9] on Taiwanese college students in first-year English classes indicated that speaking ability, among the four skills, was considered as the one that should be improved by 83.7% of the students, while Chia et al. [10] found out that the university students in higher classes perceived speaking skill more important than reading. In another survey conducted by Wu [11], 69% of the college interviewees perceived their English proficiency level as low, especially for their speaking ability, and 62% thought of "poor English pronunciation" as the common problems encountered during English learning, which coincided with the assertion that pronunciation was the most frequent cause of intelligibility problems in ELF interactions[12]. In particular, students in the technological colleges and universities encounter more severe problems than their counterparts in comprehensive universities. Their English proficiency is even lower because hands-on skills are