The impact of teaching Lingua Franca Core on English as a foreign language learners’ intelligibility and attitudes towards English pronunciation

Abstract

The current study investigated the effect of Lingua Franca Core (LFC)-based pronunciation instruction on language learners’ intelligibility and attitudes towards English pronunciation. Fifty-six high-school students were sampled as the control (n = 28) and experimental (n = 28) groups. For six months, the experimental group was taught the content of the LFC syllabus, while the control group received instruction based on the content of the British accent. At the end of the course, both groups’ recognition/production intelligibility was assessed. The results revealed that teaching pronunciation by LFC significantly affected the general pronunciation intelligibility of the experimental group as well as their recognition and production intelligibility. The participants completed an attitude questionnaire before and after the study, too. The result of data analysis showed that learners’ attitudes towards English pronunciation did not change at the end of the experiment and both groups maintained their roughly positive attitudes towards English pronunciation after the experiment.