This study examined the effects of explicit phonetic instruction on the pronunciation development of Japanese learners of English. It involved providing four hours of instruction on segmental pronunciation to an experimental group, while a control group received no instruction. Both groups were tested before and after on accentedness and comprehensibility by native English raters. The results showed no significant difference in accentedness between groups, but the experimental group showed significant gains in comprehensibility, especially for three participants. The control group showed no meaningful changes. The study provides evidence that explicit phonetic instruction can improve L2 learners' intelligibility.

1. ‘Examining the role of explicit
phonetic instruction in native-like
and comprehensible pronunciation
development : an instructed SLA
approach to L2 phonology’

2. This researc article concerns about ;
• An instructed second language acquisition
study that examines the effects of explicit
phonetic instruction on second language
acquisition.
• It reports two different outcome
measurements ;
• Rubric of accentedness
• Comprehensibility

3. Accentedness : The degree to which the
pronunciation of an utterance sounds differ from
an expected pronunciation pattern
Comprehensibility : Listeners’ estimation of
difficulty in understanding an utterance.In order
to test the interrelationship between these two
criterias Derwing and Munro conducted an
experiment with 48 ESL learners 26 native
speakers in order to rate the learners
As a result; they come into the conclusion that

4. the pronunciation mistakes of the learners don’t
necessarily cause any harm to the meaning
so, natives still can understand what they say
Pronuciation teaching:
For SLA theorists the first step for an effecitve
instruction is:
• Having learners become consciously aware of
formal rules of the target language features
• According to Derwing and Munro’s argument the
L2 leaners who learn the phonetic aspects of the
language can see the difference between their
productions and the proficient speakers’
production

5. • In order to test this SLA researchers have
recently pay attention to research-based
study
• One of these researchs is the research on 23
adult Chinese learners of English being
taught pronunciation with drilling
activities, tape-recording, interactive
activities and a no-intervention control
group
• As the research shows 120 NE listeners had
the improvement but there was no
preference between the two groups.

6. Another study divided the learners in three
• A segmental group
• A suprasegmental group
• A no-instruction group
• Those students took some tests
• Sentence-reading (controlled speeh level)
• Picture-description( spontaneous speech level)
Results are;
• ESL leaners both in segmental and suprasegmental
group were improved whereas no-instruction group
wasn’t
• Also it was seen that suprasegmental training
enhanced performance in picture-description task
while segmental training enhanced performance in
sentence-reading task.

7. Current study
• is a segmental-based instruction
• Focuses on Japanese speakers’ some
segmental problems
• Their problems to pronounce some sounds
of English which doesn’t exist in Japanese.

8. Perception activities
• 1.) Identification stage: Learners are given a
clear account of formal properties of
English-specific sounds with the focus of
three basic phonetic characteristic
• Articulator organs
• Manner of articulation
• Place of articulation
• Then, they are asked to produce these
sounds individually

9. 2-) Discrimination stage
• Students are given cross-linguistics
comparisons between the two languages’
phonetic system (J-E)
• They are asked to discriminate the target
English sounds from the closest Japanese
counterparts.

10. Production activities and feedback techniques
• As Swain’s suggestion output plays a very
important role as well as input in SLA
• Productive activities are beneficial for making
the students more conscious and careful about
the accuracy of the target language.
• There are two different production activities;
Controlled activites:
• 1.)segmental-level reading task
• 2.)word-level reading task
• 3.)sentence –level reading task

11. Communicative activities:
• Picture description activity: Learners are
asked to describe a picture as if they were
explaining to somebody who had never seen
it.
• Corrective feedback , recasts, prompts are
encouraged.

12. Methods:
• Participants: Twenty adult Japanise learners
of English in intermediate level
• They are divided into two groups;
• 10 learners in Experimental group :received 4
hours of phonetic instruction
• 10 learners in Control group :without any
instruction

13. Listeners:
Four NE listeners who are categorized as
trained NE listeners, they are familiar with non
native accents.
Speech Samples
:http://online.bilgi.edu.tr/mod/resource/index.php?id=8
946
Overall procedure :
• Firstly all 20 participants were asked to do a pre-
test, and a brief personal interview
• One week after T1, the experimental group received
one-hour instruction each week for four weeks
• The control group studied in the library

14. Human-rating method :
• Four-trained NE listeners were asked to listen
one data contains 210 randomised stimuli
• Rate them on the basis of 9-point scale on a
rubric of accentedness and comprehensibility
‘from 1: native-like to from 9: heavily accented’
‘from 1: no effort to understand to from 9: very
hard to understand’

15. Listener training:
• Listeners are ordered to focus on segmental
aspects of pronunciation, because variables
may change the ratings.
• In order to enhance the reliability they did a
warm-up session
• They randomly selected 6 sentence and
evaluate them and checked the other
listeners’ scores, to make sure of their inner
consistence.

16. Data computation:
• The four listeners are identified as 1,2,3,4
• 10 participants in the exp. group are labelles
as 1-10
• 10 participants in the cont. Group are
labelled as 11-20
• ‘accentedness-sentence reading’
• ‘accentedness-picture description’
• ‘comprehensibility- sentence reading’
• comprehensibility – picture description’

17. Results:
• In accentedness; there was no significant
difference between the two groups however;
• In terms of comprehensibility exp. Group
showed a remarkable improvement
• ‘3.83 3.27 points’
• Especially three participants in the group
improved very much in sentence-reading task
• ‘P1: 4.25 2.25 points’
• ‘P2 :4.25 3.25 points’
• ‘P8: 6.5 4.5 points’

18. • The control group showed no remarkable
differencies in comprehensibility ,neither.
• ‘3.82 3.73 points’
Conclusion
• This study examined the efficacy of explicit phonetic
instruction in the context of NJs and revealed
noteworthy results. The study clearly showed us how
the learners can develop their pronunciation and
become an intelligible, satisfying L2 speakers of
English.
• However, the fact that NJs showed very little
improvement on accentedness supported the belief
that acquiring a native-like accent is cognitively and
physically difficult for the learners.

19. • Considering that, it is better for the teachers to
focus on fluency and intelligibility rather than
accuracy of sounds, that because over-focusing
on reaching a ‘perfect’ accent may cause
demoralization among the students.
• This kind of study may be considered
deficient, because of the fact that its activities
are decontextualized, there should be various
communicative tasks so that the students
would improve not only in the controlled-
speech level.
• Lastly, as a future direction this study can be
applied to all types of language features
(morphlogy,syntax)and students’ improvement
can be examined.