REVISITING THE PROBLEMATIC ENGLISH SOUNDS FOR PROSPECTIVE TURKISH EFL TEACHERS

Abstract

Nonnative teachers of English as a foreign language (EFL), who must present role models, especially when their speech is the only source of input for their students (Richards, 2015), are a fifth group added to the list of Morley (1991), according to which teachers’ oral communication needs warrant a high level of intelligibility and thus requires them to receive special assistance with pronunciation (Celce-Murcia et al., 2010). Professionally speaking, EFL teachers must also possess certain teaching standards or qualifications concerning English pronunciation according to both national and international teaching frameworks (European Commission, 2011; Ministry of National Education, 2017; TESOL, 2019). Despite this essential requirement and the significance of pronunciation in oral communication (Pennington & Rogerson-Revell, 2019), pronunciation is deemphasized in teacher education settings (Baker, 2014). Given the professional and communicative salience of pronunciation, any pronunciation problems of EFL teacher candidates and practicing teachers should be surmounted, or related needs analyses should be performed. To this end, this study intended to re-examine the problematic segmental pronunciation features for Turkish EFL teacher trainees as to perception and production using a mixed-methods case study design (MM-CS). The findings revealed both similarities and differences with earlier studies. The study concluded that the teacher trainees were moderately accented, easily comprehensible, and comparatively intelligible.