Foreign language acquisition: a study on the development of english pronunciation skills by Majorcan Secondary Education students

Abstract

[eng] This work studies the effectiveness of the use of explicit and implicit pronunciation instruction in lessons of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) in a secondary education school in Majorca. Oral data were collected from 26 students through a pronunciation test carried out before (pre-test) and after (post-test) a sequence of lessons including a diversity of materials covering English pronunciation both explicitly and implicitly. The study measured the quality of students’ pronunciation gathered from the audio samples. A contrastive analysis between Spanish, Catalan and English was used in order to provide evidence of possible linguistic transfer in relation to students’ English pronunciation. Results are satisfying in that they confirm the usefulness of pronunciation instruction in secondary education EFL lessons.