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.

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The aim of this practice is to measure and improve the accuracy and fluency of students’ English speech in a junior high school. The author conducted an “Online test” which consists of listening and speaking section to measure the fluency and accuracy of the students' speech using specific grammatical structures (present tense, present progressive, past tense, and present perfect). The test was conducted twice a year, and a task activity was also conducted in between. The percentage of correct responses on each test was analyzed to investigate how the online test and its following instruction and the task activity affected students' speech fluency and accuracy. The results showed that students could understand the appropriate expression for each situation through listening, but they could not immediately speak it out, and that there were some common features in the questions with low percentages of correct answers. Based on the results of the test, the author looked back at his previous instruction, analyze the factors that increase the fluency and accuracy of students' speech, and explore the better way to teach English in junior high schools.

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