Role of instruction in the perception of English high back vowels

Abstract

This article aims to analyze whether formal instruction influences Brazilian speakers' perception of the English high back vowels contrast. There have been a few L2 pieces of research that focused on the instruction of specific vowel contrasts. Previous studies indicate that a single L1 category seems to be a source of difficulty to L2 vowel discrimination. However, some of these investigations did not focus on the role of instruction to such discrimination. The participants of the present study were 17 Brazilian speakers of Portuguese as L1, beginning learners of English, divided into experimental and control groups. The study included a perception pretest, a pronunciation instruction class, taught only to the experimental group, and a perception posttest. Results showed that experimental and control groups obtained similar results. Based on that, some factors were pointed to possibly explain this outcome, such as the duration of the pronunciation instruction, the possibility of participants learning with the pretest itself, the duration of the data collection, the participants' possible assimilation of the target contrast into a single category, and the interference of the mid central vowel /?/ used as a distractor in the data collection. On the other hand, a qualitative analysis revealed that all participants in the experimental group found the pronunciation instruction helpful. Such findings seem to agree entirely or in part with other similar studies' results.