The intelligibility-based approach to the pronunciation teaching of English: experimental evidence of /l/and /r/distinction

Kang, Seokhan. 2015. The Intelligibility-based Approach to the Pronunciation Teaching of English: Experimental Evidence of /l/ and /r/Distinction. English Language and Linguistics 21.2, 61-81. This work tries to support the justification of an intelligibility-based approach to English pronunciation teaching in our EFL educational environment. In this study, both production and perception experiments were conducted for thirty Korean learners of English and ten native English speakers. The production experiment showed that the high proficiency group demonstrates any significant difference of F3 values only in the picture-story telling task which could be more similar as natural conversation. However, their pronunciation could hardly lead to native speakers’ distinctive rating patterns of ‘good pronunciation’. The judgement tests showed that native English raters marked ‘good-enough’ liquids pronunciation even to comparatively severe foreign-accented Korean speech of English which exerted different ranges of F3 from those of native English speakers’ acoustic features. Thus, this study proved that native English raters were tolerant of foreigners’ narrow range of F3 for both liquid sounds, widening the F3 range in judging the ‘good-enough’ liquids. Overall, it implied that we might rely more on the intelligibility principle, not on the native-like accurate pronunciation features in teaching English pronunciation.