An Investigation of the Teachers’ Sense of Plausibility in Reduction of Advanced EFL Learners’ Phonetic Fossilization

Prabhu (1990) underscored the importance of teacher s sense of plausibility as awareness or pedagogic intuition of what constitutes the good teaching in promoting the process of learning and setting an optimal context for learning. The present study was conducted to investigate the teachers’ sense of plausibility inreduction of advanced EFL learners’ phonological fossilization. The participants were 40 male and female teachers who taught English in private institutions. To fulfill the purpose of this study, they were asked to be interviewed to form their opinions as well as their pedagogic intuition of the reasons involved in the process offossilization in foreign language learning. The findings indicated that teachers all possess an open, active, andcritical sense of plausibility in pursuit of appropriate pedagogy to eradicate fossilization errors. Language transfer and transfer of training were considered as the most prominent factors causing the persistence of some phonetic errors in learners’ interlanguage system. The findings also indicated that provision of feedback,enough exposure to the target language, and instruction in a nonthreatening environment without developing asense of inhibition in learners would definitely make a huge contribution in reduction of fossilization errors. Such valuable insights can carry practical implications for teaching in the way that teachers with different senses of plausibility can work in collaboration to open an avenue to let the effective teaching flourish.

Keywords:

Sense of plausibility , Fossilization , Pedagogy , Phonetic fossilization