An examination of Turkish EFL teacher trainees’ pronunciation knowledge, perception, and production

Abstract

With the proliferation of research in recent decades, pronunciation has ceased to be the “Cinderella” of language teaching. However, there are still gaps between research findings and classroom implementations (Olson, 2014). To this end, this classroom-based, experimental study explored pronunciation knowledge, perception, and production among first-year Turkish EFL teacher trainees in the context of a sixteen-week-long undergraduate course. Data were collected through three diagnostic tests. In this regard, eighty participants were pretested before and post-tested after the course. The collected data were examined descriptively and inferentially via the IBM SPPS Version 25. Findings indicated dissimilar levels of rise in knowledge (modest), perception (slight), and production (substantial) performances of teacher trainees. Nevertheless, specific gaps in knowledge and problems with segmental and suprasegmental pronunciation features remained. Results were discussed, pedagogical implications were thoroughly assessed, limitations to the study were recognized, and recommendations for future research were made.

Keywords

• knowledge
• perception
• pronunciation
• teacher cognition
• teacher training