Master's Thesis Defense:

Since the implementation of the communicative approaches in the 1970s, pronunciation in second language instruction has been overlooked. Recent research has proven pronunciation instruction and corrective feedback to be beneficial for students’ second language pronunciation. The purpose of this study was to analyze which correction method, between self-correction and explicit correction, was more effective at improving students’ pronunciation of the Spanish sounds [x] 'j' and -ø- 'h' in word-initial position. A pre-test was conducted in two groups of 18 students taking Spanish II at a private Midwestern college. The participants received instruction and models of how to pronounce words with the studied sounds. For the next seven weeks, one of the two groups used the explicit correction method and the other one used self-correction. A week before the end of the semester the post-test was conducted. A two-way ANOVA analysis served to examine the effects of the two correction methods. The findings have pedagogical implications and will show that the self-correction method benefited students’ pronunciation more.