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The purpose of this study is to see if drill-based pronunciation instruction which focus on listening discrimination and speaking practice has any effects on the improvement of English proficiency. To that end, a small scale experiment was conducted, where 24 Korean college students and 2 native English speakers participated as subjects and assessors respectively. The assessors rated the oral production of the subjects at two points to compare the progress of accuracy and fluency. For the experiment, the subjects were instructed how to produce and perceive English segmental and suprasegmental features of pronunciation. They practiced in producing these features for 12 weeks with two 75-minute sessions per week. The results indicate that the subjects' pronunciation has changed over 12 weeks (t=0.012, p<0.5). Particularly, consonant pronunciation (t=0.015, p<0.5) and intonation (t=0.050, p<0.5) have changed statistically significantly but vowel pronunciation and stress have not. Of importance is that overall fluency including comprehensibility and intelligibility has not improved significantly (t=0.398, p<0.5). Another statistical analysis was used to find any correlations between the subcomponents of pronunciation. Multiple correlation analyses show that overall fluency ratings are highly correlated with intonation(r=0.84 on pre-test, r=0.81 on post-test), followed by stress(r=0.69 on pre-test, r=0.80 on post-test). This finding confirms previous research arguing for the primacy of prosodies affecting proficiency (Derwing & Rossiter, 2003; Hardison, 2004). |
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