English Articulatory Phonetics Knowledge for Improving Vocabulary Pronunciation Abilities of First-Year English Majors at Thaksin University

Abstract

          One of the main aims of teaching English is to encourage students to communicate in English.  To develop the students’ communication abilities, English teachers need to help them acquire and learn accurate information on the sound features of vocabulary as well as enable them to pronounce words correctly. These abilities are considered to be a crucial element bolstering their effectiveness of English-speaking communication. Therefore, English Articulatory Phonetics was taught to improve their pronunciation abilities, together with a conduction of quasi-experimental research. This research contained the following 2 objectives. The first objective was to compare students’ abilities to pronounce the vocabulary in Set 1 before and after studying English Articulatory Phonetics and transcription training, including practicing pronunciation from phonemic scripts in an English-English dictionary. The other objective was to compare the students’ abilities to pronounce English vocabulary in Set 1 and Set 2 after studying to examine the developmental tendencies and directions of their abilities as well as their ability levels when encountering new vocabulary. Using a purposive sampling technique, this study involved 32 first-year English majors. The research instruments included (1) the two sets of the English vocabulary and (2) 15 lesson plans on articulatory phonetics. Concerning data analysis, the statistics comprised mean (x̄), standard deviation (S.D.), and T-test.
           The findings revealed that (1) the articulatory phonetics knowledge could enhance the students' abilities to pronounce the vocabulary in Set 1 more effectively. Before studying, their abilities to pronounce it without a dictionary being employed were at a low level (x̄ = 2.5 ; S.D. = 0.7) and with a Thai-English dictionary were at a moderate level (x̄ = 2.7 ; S.D. = 0.3). Nevertheless, after the 15 lesson plans were completed, their abilities to pronounce without a dictionary were at high level (x̄ = 4.1 ; S.D. = 0.6) and with an English-English dictionary were at a very high level (x̄ = 4.7 ; S.D. = 0.4). Their post-test scores were higher than their pre-test ones with the statistical significance of .05. (2) The students’ ability levels in pronouncing the vocabulary in Set 1 and Set 2 after studying increased and contained the same tendencies and directions: their abilities to pronounce the vocabulary in Set 1 were at high and very high levels (x̄ = 4.1 ; S.D. = 0.6) and (x̄ = 4.7 ; S.D. = 0.4) and their abilities to pronounce that in Set 2 were at moderate and very high levels (x̄ = 3.0 ; S.D. = 0.6) and (x̄ = 4.6 ; S.D. = 0.5).