2022 Volume 32 Pages 1-18
In this study, the authors conducted a pronunciation training program using smartphones in a general education English course at a Japanese university. The purpose of this training is to measure (1)whether learning English pronunciation is effective in motivating students to learn English, and (2)to what extent it can improve their pronunciation knowledge and skills. The training was conducted as follows: the teacher explained how to pronounce the target sounds in class, and after class, the students videoed their mouth shape and tongue position while reading conversational texts with their smartphones and submitted it as an assignment. The authors evaluated each student’s pronunciation and analyzed whether pronunciation skills improved or not. After one semester of training, nearly one-third of the students showed positive attitudes toward learning English and significant improvement in their English pronunciation, while another third of the students showed moderate positive attitudes and improvement. The remaining one-third of the learners showed only a slight or little change before and after the training. The authors concluded that the pronunciation training was of limited success as it only reproduced exchange value based on evaluation and failed to lead to the discovery of actual use-value among the students.
