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http://dx.doi.org/10.5392/JKCA.2020.20.08.101

The Effectiveness of Explicit Form-Focused Instruction in Teaching the Schwa /ə/  

Lee, Yunhyun (대전반석고등학교)
Publication Information
The Journal of the Korea Contents Association / v.20, no.8, 2020 , pp. 101-113 More about this Journal
Abstract
This study aimed to explore how effective explicit form-focused instruction (FFI) is in teaching the schwa vowel /ə/ to EFL students in a classroom setting. The participants were 25 female high school students, who were divided into the experimental group (n=13) and the control group (n=12). One female American also participated in the study for a speech sample as a reference. The treatment, which involves shadowing model pronunciation by the researcher and a free text-to-speech software and the researcher's feedback in a private session, was given to the control group over a month and a half. The speech samples, for which the participants read the 14 polysyllabic stimulus words followed by the sentences containing the words, were collected before and after the treatment. The paired-samples t test and non-parametric Wilcoxon signed-rank test were used for analysis. The results showed that the participants of the experimental group in the post-test reduced the duration of the schwa by around 40 percent compared to the pre-test. However, little effect was found in approximating the participants' distribution patterns of /ə/ measured by the F1/F2 formant frequencies to the reference point, which was 539 Hz (F1) by 1797 Hz (F2). The findings of this study suggest that explicit FFI with multiple repetitions and corrective feedback is partly effective in teaching pronunciation.
Keywords
Form Focused Instruction; Schwa; Noticing; Pronunciation Teaching; F1/F2 Formants;
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