Teachers’ Beliefs and Practices Towards Teaching English Pronunciation Among English as a Foreign Language Senior High School Teachers in Yunnan Province, China
Keywords:
EFL teachers’ beliefs, practices, English pronunciationAbstract
The objectives of this study were 1) to examine the EFL senior high school teachers’ beliefs towards teaching English pronunciation and 2) to investigate the English pronunciation practices of EFL senior high school teachers use in Yunnan province. The participants were 59 EFL senior high school teachers in Yunnan province who were purposively sampled. There were 3 research instruments which were 1) online questionnaire; 2) semi-structured interview and 3) classroom observation. Quantitative data were analyzed by the descriptive statistics, included the means and standard deviation and qualitative data were analyzed by content analysis. The findings revealed that 1) Yunnan EFL teachers’ beliefs towards pronunciation teaching was highly positive and most of them believed that it was really necessary to teach English pronunciation. The pronunciation teaching goals were mixed between native-like fluency and intelligibility. 2) Yunnan EFL teachers spent some but not much time on teaching segmental features and supra-segmental features. Because of the examination-oriented system, time limitation and lacking of pronunciation teaching training, Yunnan EFL teachers used traditional teaching methods and controlled practices to teach pronunciation. Thus, English pronunciation teaching should be given an attention among EFL teachers and they should apply different teaching methods.
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