An Action Research on the Effective English Phonetic Learning for College Students

Abstract

One of the key issues for effective English learning is to make students easily read and speak in English. Although most college students can pass the testing of English writing and/or reading in Taiwan, they still fail or afraid to speak in English. The Kenyon and Knott phonetic transcription, KK phonetic transcription, is wildly applied as the basic learning tool for most students in Taiwan. This research is aimed to improve the learning effectiveness by firstly developing a set of easy-understanding learning guide about phonetic and phonic rules, and followed by the motivational strategy of action learning that outreach the course learning to their families or friends to learn KK phonetic symbols. The process of this research was divided into 4 cycles of planning, implementing the efficient textbook learning and ask students to teach their families or friends, observations of the students’ teaching materials and their teaching process by video, and students’ share and reflection. The results show that motivational strategies of asking students to teach the KK Phonetic Transcription to someone that is close to them do have positive effects in improving the confidence of speaking English.