The effect of listening to spoken reading exercises on pronunciation in English as a foreign language classes for state secondary school students

This study first gives the brief summary of pronunciation, reading aloud and listening in Teaching English as a Second Language. It clarifies the interrelation between them and describes potential sources of difficulties in pronunciation of English. The aim of the study was to find out the error types and the reasons of pronunciation errors of English in secondary schools of Turkey. The potential effect of listening and reading aloud activities on pronunciation of English was also aimed to reveal by this study. The study focused on the errors that originating from the phonemes while allophones, suprasegmentals and other aspects were generally ignored. The study was carried out at Atışalanı Anatolian High school with a total of 30 participants, 15 of whom are males and 15 females. They were 10th grade students and their ages were between 15 and 17. They used Yes You Can A1.2 as textbook constituted by the Ministry of National Education. The data was collected with 5 different reading texts chosen from 3 units of the book with a total of 32 words to be examined. Voices of 30 students were recorded for each activity. The sound recordings were also examined by the three teachers of English who were the researcher's colleagues. Mispronounced words were discussed and they were determined mutually. Six listening activities containing the mispronounced words were put into practice to reveal the effect of these activities on pronunciation of the students. Listening and reading aloud techniques were used during these practices. After these activities, the participants performed the reading texts again and their developments were observed with the help of the recorded performances. The analysis of the results revealed that more than half of the participants could pronounce most of the words that they had mispronounced before the listening activities although all of the participants could pronounce the words correctly during the repeat after and reading aloud activities. The positive effect of listening and reading aloud activities on pronunciation was evident from the results. The results also revealed the types and reasons of the errors of pronunciation in most of the words as the errors were similar for most of the participants. In conclusion, it is expected that this study will contribute as a guide to further studies of English language especially in the matter of English pronunciation teaching in Turkey and will help English teachers to determine the source of the pronunciation errors and to fix them.