English Pronunciation Teaching at Secondary Schools: Discoveries From an EFL Context

Abstract

Pronunciation research within the past three decades has seen growing empirical evidence on the efficiency of deliberate, explicit phonetic instruction on second language learners’ intelligibility and/or comprehensibility. This body of work has also examined how pronunciation is represented in instructional materials, how teachers construct pronunciation teaching and what pedagogic beliefs they hold, and how students perceive pronunciation instruction. To date, however, research on EFL teachers’ pronunciation teaching at secondary schools and how this particular cohort of teachers learn to teach pronunciation is relatively limited. The present study addresses this research gap by investigating Vietnamese secondary EFL teachers’ pronunciation teaching practices, what pedagogic beliefs shaped their instruction, and what kind of pronunciation pedagogy training they received. Qualitative data were collected from written reflections, classroom observations, and individual interviews with nine teachers of English across three secondary schools in South Vietnam. Findings reveal that the teachers’ pronunciation teaching mainly centered on: (1) repetition drills, (2) corrective feedback through recasts and/or prompts, and (3) Vietnamese transcriptions, with repetition drills being the most common technique among the teachers. The study further shows that the teachers’ insufficient initial training in pronunciation pedagogy and the nature of testing and assessment practices at secondary schools had an impact on their instructional practices. Implications for pronunciation instruction and pedagogy training are discussed.