| Summary: | 碩士 === 朝陽科技大學 === 應用英語系 === 103 === Recently the deficiency of English ability among students in vocational colleges and universities in Taiwan has raised major concerns. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the effectiveness of computer assisted pronunciation instruction in English pronunciation for these students. The participants were fifty-one first-year undergraduate students from a technological university located in central Taiwan. The participants received an eight-week pronunciation instruction, in which the participants were presented model utterances and corresponding pitch contours of target sentences and then practiced pronunciation of target sentences with computer assisted pronunciation training software. Computerized speaking tests were conducted before, during, and after the training to measure the improvement of pronunciation quality, and a questionnaire was administered at the end of the instruction. The results of repeated measures analysis of variance on the scores of the tests indicate that the pronunciation quality of the participants was significantly improved. Analysis on the questionnaire response shows that the participants’ awareness of phonological features was increased and the perception of the usefulness of the instruction was positive. The results of this study provide empirical evidence in teaching pronunciation to vocational college students with computer technology.
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