Acoustic analysis of the English pronunciation of Japanese high school teachers and university students.

Abstract

As Japan attempts to meet the demands of the Ministry of Education by introducing English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) classes in all elementary schools, there has been a shortage of qualified native Japanese EFL teachers. The English communicative ability (and pronunciation, in particular) of Japanese EFL teachers varies across educational levels throughout Japan and even within individual prefectures. This study presents an acoustic analysis of 77 Fukushima Prefecture junior and senior high school Japanese EFL teachers’ read speech, comparing the two levels. It also presents an analysis of 133 Japanese university students’ read speech, recorded both before and after 14 weeks of weekly 90-min explicit pronunciation instruction. The reading passage was the “Please call Stella” paragraph from the speech accent archive (http://accent.gmu.edu/). Detailed analyses of vowel formants, voice onset time, fricative spectral peaks, and intonation were carried out using PRAAT and will be presented. The data have implications for curriculum planning for both EFL pronunciation classes and teacher training courses in Japan.