Critique of Kazuya Saito in “The Influence of Explicit Phonetic Instruction on Pronunciation in EFL Settings: The Case of English Vowels and Japanese Learners of English”

by: Tony Anggadha

In his article entitled “The Influence of Explicit Phonetic Instruction on Pronunciation in EFL Settings: The Case of English Vowels and Japanese Learners of English” Kazuya Saito stated that Japanese learners have difficulty in learning English pronunciations, especially in segmental phonology. This is because Japanese learners have to learn many phonemes that do not exist in Japanese but do exist in English. Experiments are made to solve this problem, and the result demonstrated that explicit phonetic instructions enhance learners’ pronunciation of the target language. This result is true and can be accepted. Moreover, most researchers agree that teaching phonetic is more effective through explicit instructions.

Kazuya said that it is important to give attention to pronunciation teaching in English education. He explains two difficulties in teaching pronunciation. First, the class cannot always have native speakers of English as teachers. Second, since teachers are usually non-native speakers of English, they might not be confident, or still not competent enough, to be able to provide students feedback that is very crucial to successful pronunciation teaching. This study emphasizes how explicit phonetic instruction can improve pronunciation teaching in Japan and presents a research-based experiment that provides tangible results in which Japanese learners of English improve their speech production greatly. In addition, this study explores the capabilities of Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL) in order to make pronunciation teaching more explicit. Ultimately, the present study aims to make a valuable contribution to the field of TEFL, particularly for Japanese learners of English. The pedagogical idea describe in this study may be advanced to other EFL contexts in Asian countries which are similar to that of Japan.

If we see from the subject matter, the research is important to discuss. As Kazuya quoted form Wei, this subject is necessary to discuss because although English has become more disseminated globally the importance of pedagogies for English has increased, pronunciation teaching is still not given enough attention, especially in English education in Asian countries. So, this article is really helps for the development of pronunciation teaching.

Based on my experience, I agree that the differences in phonemes can cause difficulties in learning others language. For instance, when I try to spell ”teuing”, a sundanese word, it is hard for me to spell /eu/ (I do not know what is the correct symbol), because I don not have that phoneme in my daily talk/conversation. I face the same problem when I spell /æ/, because this phoneme does not exist in Indonesian. This result of the study shows that Japanese learners of English have difficulties in spelling phonemes whose phonemic inventories differ considerably from that of English. It is no surprise that they have difficulties in pronouncing English due to the fact that English has many phones that do not exist in Japanese. In fact, Tsujimura notes the segmental differences between English and Japanese both in vowels (English: 12, Japanese: 5) and consonants (English: 24, Japanese: 14). According to Ohata (2004), many Japanese learners of English have difficulties pronouncing certain sounds that don’t exist in Japanese but do in English.

In my point of view, the learners usually change the phonemes which “strange” for them with the closest phoneme of their mother tongue. This opinion is based on Fledge’s study. His inventions states that second language learners usually substitute the closest first language phones for similar ones.

As the conclusion, it is common for English learners have difficulties in learning pronunciation, especially segmental phonemes which do not exist in their first language. As the result, the learners will search for the closest phoneme for the second language phoneme and replace the phoneme.