The Pre-Service EFL Teachers’ Development of Phonological Processing and Evaluation of Their Attitudes toward Pronunciation

Abstract

This study aimed at investigating EFL pre-service teachers’ attitudes towards pronunciation and pronunciation teaching. Another purpose was to explore the outcomes of pronunciation instruction of EFL pre-service teachers’ phonological development and, based on the findings, to provide suggestions taking learners’ pedagogical needs into consideration. The study was conducted using a quantitative research design. 107 EFL pre-service teachers participated in the phase of questionnaire responding of the study, while 86 of whom participated in the interventional phase of the study. For fourteen weeks, one of the researchers provided EFL preservice teachers with pronunciation instruction focusing on segmental and suprasegmental features in English pronunciation. The results revealed that the participants had generally positive attitudes toward proper pronunciation in target language, which means that participants agreed upon the importance of pronunciation in target language and perceive pronunciation as a vital component of language learning and teaching. As to the interventional findings, it was found that the participants displayed significant improvement in articulation of vowels and consonants. In addition, the present study also found out that the participants’ post-test scores at the suprasegmental level (word-stress, intonation comprehensibility) were significantly higher than their pre-test scores.