Improving Pronunciation Teaching for Adult Learners

Korean students who have limited exposure to verbal English education are in need of effective methods that might make the most of the existing environmental context. The purpose of this study is to replicate the finding that the use of alphabets can be a practical alternative to teach pronunciation skills to beginning level adult students in terms of students' perspective (Bae, 2007). Due to the lack of homogeneity in two subject groups, two teaching methods have to be assigned to each group randomly and the test results of the pre and post tests were collected and analyzed in both groups. The group with the alphabet method made statistically meaningful progress in all categories (p<.001): word pronunciation, sentence pronunciation, word stress, and sentence stress. The group with the phonetic symbol method made progress in two categories: word pronunciation (p=.008) and sentence pronunciation (p=.042).