A comparison study on the effects of two explicit pronunciation syllabi on Korean adult EFL learners' learning of English sounds

textThis study compared two explicit approaches to teaching English pronunciation to Korean adult EFL learners. One approach involved teaching agendas based on the analysis of pronunciation errors that were considered to be typically observed in the target students. The other approach involved rather general teaching agendas that considered no specific L1 background. The experimental group, the error-analysis-based group, was taught by two Korean instructors of English, while the control group was taught by two native English-speaking instructors. The experimental group teachers used an in-house workbook that consisted of segmental sound items from the clinical data obtained from the error analysis. These Korean instructors of English presented short authentic video clips that the researcher edited from feature movies, situational comedies, news casts, etc. to the learners as model L2 utterances. The native English-speaking teachers used a pre-existing pronunciation workbook published by two native English-speaking language practitioners and presented relevant parts of the supplementary tutorial video to their learners. These four 75-minute pronunciation lectures were conducted as a part of an English intensive course at a tertiary institute in Korea. The two groups did not significantly differ in terms of L2 identification improvements. Based on the real-word and fake-word reading-aloud tests, the experimental group indicated a significantly higher production accuracy rate than the accuracy mean score observed in the control group. Mean accuracy scores of the identification and production tests of each individual sound were compared using Post Hoc ANCOVA techniques for any significant mean differences. Qualitative data from relevant surveys were also included.Foreign Language Educatio