Ted talks in intelligible pronunciation

Abstract

Nowadays, people around the world communicate using a lingua franca, English, that facilitates interactions among people with different mother tongue backgrounds. It is necessary to teach language like a system including all the components at the same time, vocabulary, grammar, function and phonology. For instance, analyzing individual words in a language means vocabulary, putting them in a context to interact with other words belongs to grammar aspect of language, exploring how the words are produced is phonology and finally using them in particular situations is linked to the functionality of a language. The objectives of this project are to reduce the feeling of rejection from teachers to teach pronunciation and redirect the purposes to teach pronunciation in English classes. Reaching native like pronunciation is not a real goal in pronunciation because there are more nonnative speakers than native speakers. Under these circumstances, the research project tried to determine whether TED Talks help to develop intelligible pronunciation in a group of 30 students of first Bachillerato at “Isabel de Godin” High School during the school year 2017-2018. The research applied the qualitative method, but in a systematic way due to the researcher gathered information where the phenomena occurs naturally, through an observation sheet. The results gathered before and after six weeks were statistically analyzed. At the end of the project, it is concluded that TED Talks is an innovative tool that facilitates to teach suprasegmental features of pronunciation. Subsequently, it is advisable that teachers need to include TICs to improve their teaching process and increase student’s awareness about pronunciation and go further to reach intelligible pronunciation.