Comparing Immediate and Delayed Correcting Students’ Errors of pronunciation and its impact on Improving their pronunciation ability

Pronunciation is a part of learning any language. Teaching pronunciation has a lot of approaches and methods in languages. And one of the most important parts of teaching pronunciation is how to deal with the learners’ errors. Considering the difference between errors and mistakes, there are some ideas about the issue. This study is going to compare the impact of immediate and delayed correcting students’ errors of pronunciation on improving their pronunciation ability. The study is done at a high school in Nehbandan, a small city in Khorasane Jonoobi province, at the east of Iran. Based on wellknown ideas about correcting students’ errors, the author has made two hypotheses and tries to investigate them. The sample of the study is 90 intermediate students out of about 210. The students are divided in to three groups, one of them is the control group, and the other two, are experimental for immediate and delayed correction. This study is both quantitative and qualitative. So the numerical data is used to confirm the hypotheses. Using SPSS, the analysis of the results is based on One Way Anova Test which compares students’ scores on pronunciation ability. The instrument of the study is a selected text from Reading with Fun (a reading book published by Khate Sefid Press). Using ONE WAY ANOWA test, we concluded that there is a significant relationship between correcting students’ errors of pronunciation and improving their pronunciation ability. On the other hand, comparing two main feedbacks to students’ errors (immediate and delayed), we found that delayed correction is more useful on improving students’ pronunciation ability.

Keywords:

Pronunciation , Teaching and learning second/foreign language , correcting errors/mistakes , feedback , students’ errors