The Effect of Letter-Sound Correspondence Instruction on Iranian EFL Learners’ English Pronunciation Improvement

Abstract

This study aims to investigate the effect of letter-sound correspondence instruction on improving Iranian EFL learners’ pronunciation. Due to the disparity or non-correspondence between spelling and pronunciation in English, it is obvious that Iranian EFL learners often mispronounce English words. To this end, sixty male and female EFL learners were chosen through convenience sampling. The participants’ age group ranged from 18 to 22. They were divided randomly in equal size and gender into two groups of experimental and control. The experimental group was exposed to letter-sound correspondence training during sixteen weeks. One of the salient characteristics of the instruction was the use of transcribed scripts along with scripts and their audios. To collect the data, a part of Core Phonics Survey was applied. The result of the t-test revealed that as developing letter-sound awareness, Iranian EFL learners pronounced the words and pseudo words more accurately. The results for experimental groups in pronunciation improvement were statistically significant as compared to those of the control group.