TRACKING PRONUNCIATION IMPROVEMENT: A FORMANT-BASED STUDY OF ENGLISH VOWELS IN PAKISTANI LEARNERS OF ESL

Abstract

The present study tracks the improvement in pronunciation of English words spoken by Pakistani learners of English. Teacher-led International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) instruction is employed for the pronunciation among a group of 15 purposively selected students of 1^st year studying in a public sector Pakistani university located in Lahore. A list of 15 most commonly mispronounced words of English was used before introducing IPA based instruction. After the intervention of 4 weeks, the same list of words was used as a post-test among the sample. Both the samples were analyzed using PRAAT software. Two vowel formants F1 and F2 were calculated and compared for each of the 15 words. The results and analyses found that there had been mixed trends of improvement in pronunciation of the words depicted by their vowel formants values. Sound recordings of three participants are presented for the understanding of the readers. Challenging vowel sounds for individual learners have been indicated with suggestions to improve.