Towards the Use of Phonetic Transcription in Teaching Pronunciation

Abstract

In the past, teaching pronunciation had little attention from language teachers and linguists. Recently a great deal of research was conducted in teaching pronunciation and many methods and techniques were tested. The current research was conducted to investigate the effectiveness of using Phonetic Transcription in teaching pronunciation to the second semester English Department students during the fall semester of the academic year (2019-2020). The study was an attempt to answer the following research question: will using phonetic symbols in teaching pronunciation help students pronounce words correctly? The participants in this study were second semester students in the department of English at university of Benghazi. The data was collected via a pre-test and a post-test. The results show that using this method of teaching pronunciation effectively improved students` ability in pronunciation.

This research aims to help teachers gain theoretical knowledge and to confirm and extend what they already know. The goals of this research are to identify the features of pronunciation, and introduce the IPA (the international phonetic alphabets) as a tool for pronunciation teaching.