The effect of pronunciation teaching on the vocational school students' willingness to communicate

Knowing English has been important for decades and its importance becoming greater while the world is becoming connected than ever. International communication has become more needed at both personal and business levels, which requires not only a good understanding of English but also an acceptable level of speaking competence with an intelligible pronunciation. A lot of Turkish students seem to master the linguistic features of English giving enough effort, however, they have difficulty in using that knowledge when they speak. Considering pronunciation is a neglected area of English language teaching and one of the desired outcomes of language teaching is having students with communicative competence, this study aims to find out the relationship between pronunciation and willingness to communicate (WTC) and explore whether students' WTC can be enhanced by developing their pronunciation skills. For the study, in the fall term of 2020-2021, 54 second-year vocational school students from cooking, accounting, tourism and hotel management, and marina and yacht management departments from a state university in Muğla were selected as participants. To be able to fulfill the aims of the study a one group pre-test post-test quasi-experimental design was chosen and an 8-week pronunciation teaching program is included in students' regular English classes. The quantitative data were obtained from the pre and post-tests of the pronunciation test and WTC questionnaire. The data were analyzed using the SPSS 22.0 package program employing the Pearson-Spearman correlation test and paired sample t-test. The findings showed a moderate level positive relationship between pronunciation and WTC, and the significant differences between the pre-test and post-tests for pronunciation and WTC indicated that pronunciation teaching had a positive effect on vocational students' WTC, regardless of their departments.