Improving Upper Secondary School Students' Pronunciation Skill on the Problematic Sounds through the Natural Approach

Abstract

The purposes of this study were to investigate whether or not the Natural Approach could help students improve their pronunciation skill on the problematic sounds and to investigate how the Natural Approach helped students improve their pronunciation skill on the problematic sounds. The participants were eight upper secondary school students studying at a private school in Khon Kaen province, Thailand. They were those who had the most questionable pronunciation skill. The instruments for data collection consisted of English pronunciation pre-test, post-test, a semi-structured interview, and a learning log. Six lesson plans specifically designed based on the Natural Approach together with the cycles of action research included passages, songs, movies, games, tasks and series and open-dialogs that comprised the problematic sounds which were the final sounds of /d/, /t/ and /ɪd/. The data were analyzed using percentage and content analysis. The findings revealed that (1) the scores of the students’ English pronunciation skill was higher after learning through the use of Natural Approach, and (2) the Natural Approach was proved to be an effective way to help the student improve their English pronunciation skill. Finally, the findings also suggest pedagogical implications for teachers who wish to improve students’ pronunciation skills.

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