The Teachability of English Pronunciation to Final-Year Middle-School Pupils

Abstract

Textbooks should be designed in a way that suits the learners’ needs as well as their abilities. This dissertation set itself the overriding aim of investigating the teachability of the pronunciation content incorporated into in the second-generation fourth year middle school textbook through evaluating its suitability to the manifold learners’ needs and abilities. This study has been conducted through a descriptive method; the research has been arried out through a self-constructed evaluation checklist and a questionnaire for fourth year middle school teachers. More specifically, the questionnaire sample consists of randomly selected twenty-eight fourth year middle school English teachers; the teachers’ questionnaire was a blend of both qualitative and quantitative data; this latter assisted the researchers to create the evaluation checklist item about fourth year middle school pupils’ ronunciation learning needs. Through a review of the available checklists, which were mostly designed to valuate general English textbooks but they were not generalizable enough to be adopted in the evaluation of any English textbook or to suit any learning/teaching context, and some insights from the questionnaire, we were able to take decisions for creating the evaluation checklist that would best suit this study. The checklist merit scores were calculated to deduce a total score and the qualitative data was resumed and discussed in a joint report. The results of both the checklist and the questionnaire showed that the pronunciation content is not suitable for the learners’ needs and abilities because it contains some unattainable pronunciation objectives that are beyond fourth year middle school pupils’ abilities and level and it does not provide the learners with what they need to reach the pronunciation objectives, like time, practice, audio materials and motivational tasks.