The Effectiveness of L2 Pronunciation Instruction: A Synthesis of 10 Empirical Studies

Abstract

The number of studies on effectiveness pronunciation instruction (PI) has been increasing during the past decades and produced mixed results, though most of them reports significant improvements. Moreover, what factors might moderate the overall effectiveness of PI on L2 development and to what extent they function are still unclear. The current study synthesizes 10 representative studies exploring the effect of PI on L2 development, especially the overall effectiveness and roles of focus of PI, type of PI and outcome measures on the overall effectiveness. According to the results, suprasegmental instruction contributes to better phonological production and comprehensibility; form-focused instruction outperforms meaning-focused one in L2 pronunciation learning but the effects of combining different types of FFI is unclear; controlled constructed tasks provide more comprehensibility gains than free constructed one. Possible reasons are summarized along with pedagogical implications.