Feedback on Pronunciation: Vietnamese EFL Teachers’ Beliefs and Practice

Abstract

In EFL classrooms today, teachers are facing the challenge of helping their students improve their intelligibility in international communication in English. Feedback is one of the main ways through which teachers are performing the task. However, feedback on students’ English pronunciation has not received commensurate attention in EFL contexts. Aiming to shed some light on this essential but neglected aspect of English language teaching (ETL), this study examines the beliefs and practices of ten experienced teachers of English at a non-English-major university in Vietnam. Findings derived from semi-structured interviews and classroom observations show that teachers largely shared a strong belief in the importance of feedback in learners’ pronunciation development. Teachers were found to mainly focus on instant feedback rather than delayed feedback, and on individual errors rather than collective ones. Findings also indicated that teachers’ approaches to feedback provision diverged greatly, which were confined by their varying expectations in pronunciation pedagogy, different knowledge, and beliefs regarding how to correct, what to correct, and who would benefit from error correction. On the basis of the findings, implications for classroom practices and teacher training were discussed.