Audio-Visual Scaffold to Smart Speaking for Grade 11 Students

Abstract

Pronunciation is definitely the biggest thing that people notice when one speaks in English (Cook, 2000). It creates the first impression one makes. In her Oral Communication class, the proponent observed that students tend to use their vernacular speech patterns when speaking in English. Furthermore, in the pre-assessment on production of 46 sounds in English among the students it was found out that 4 of the vowel sounds, 2 consonant sounds and 1 cluster sound ‘cannot be enunciated’; and 5 vowel sounds, 6 consonant sounds and 6 cluster sounds pose ‘some difficulty’ to the Grade 11 students in the TVL. But in the competencies of the subject, the learner proceeds immediately to communicative situations after the introduction of the communication process. Hence, this study aimedat injecting an intensive pronunciation instruction in the existing content of the subject to remind students of and provide them intensive drills on the sounds and speech patterns of Standard English. The teacher-made audio visual scaffold to smart speaking was specifically developed for this purpose. The before-and-after experimental design was used in this study with classes1 and 2 purposively chosen based from the results of the pre-assessment and randomly assigned as experimental and control groups. The assessment tool was lifted from a module used for the English Proficiency Program (EPP) at the Language Skills Institute (LSI) of Technical Education and Skills Development Authority (TESDA). The pronunciation pre-assessment was done through reading aloud. The post-testwas conducted after a week of intensive pronunciation practices. Parents’ consent was sought and assent forms weresigned before the conduct of the study. After the instruction, participants in classes1 and 2 were able to enunciate, though with difficulty, all the sounds. Moreover, those in class 1, who were taught and practiced with the audio-visual scaffold to smart speaking, were able to step two scales higher with the /ә/ sound. In addition, students in class 1 found some difficulties in producing the vowel sounds /ē/, /ū/, /ü/, and /ä/, the consonant sounds /p/, /t/, /r/, /z/, and /th/ (unvoiced), and the cluster sounds /thr/, /sp/, /fs/, /sks/, and /sts/ while studentsin class 2 found some difficulties in producing the vowel sounds /ē/, /ә/, /ū/ and /ō/, the consonant sounds /p/, /t/, /r/, /z/, /sh/ and /th/ (unvoiced), and the cluster sounds /thr/, /fs/, /sks/ and /sts/. After the pronunciation instruction, students in classes 1 and 2 were able to find no more difficulty in enunciating these sounds. The students still found some difficulties in enunciating the other sounds, but comparing the mean scores, it is noticeable that they have increased from the pre assessment. Comparing the results, it is noticeable that the increase in the scores of class 1 is higher than the scores of class 2. This implied that students who practice with the audio-visual scaffold enhance their speaking skills better than those who did it without the scaffold. The researcher recommends that students be exposed to more speaking activities to enhance their speaking skills especially in enunciating and pronouncing words properly. Furthermore, it is recommended that teachers develop audio-visual scaffold which they can use to enhance students’ speaking skills.