Teaching English Pronunciation Using Phonetic Cards

The literature on teaching English pronunciation is abundant in discussions on the value of teaching pronunciation. However, little attention has been paid to the issue of how to teach pronunciation in the classroom.This thesis presents a new way of teaching the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) and phonetic rules through playing phonetic cards that was designed by Li Xiaoying, an English teacher in Beijing No. 3 Middle School. The design of the phonetic cards is based on the well-known game of playing-cards, which is simple to play and organize. The new method seems to be supported by theories from several fields of study. But in practice, whether it works better for the children learning English pronunciation than the traditional teaching methods needs to be tested by empirical research.The current study is thus an attempt to test the relative effectiveness of the card-playing method compared with the traditional way of teaching pronunciation. The subjects were 62 Grade 5 students from different primary schools in Nanjing. They were randomly divided into two groups: an experimental group and a control group with 31 subjects each. The phonetic training lasted for ten lessons (two hours per lesson). The experimental. group was taught by using the card-playing method while the control group was taught in the traditional way. Both groups were tested for phonetic competence at the beginning and at the end of the phonetic training in order to evaluate the effectiveness of both teaching methods. Furthermore, the experimental group members were asked to answer a questionnaire after the instruction, in order to ascertain the learners' own feelings and opinions during and after the ten-lesson phonetic training.The SPSS (Statistical Package for the Social Science) was used to analyze the data of the two tests. The results indicate that both groups made significant progress in learning pronunciation and the experimental group showed a significantly greater improvement than the control group.The results of the study demonstrate that using the card-playing method to teach...