Cartoons and English pronunciation

Abstract

The current investigation is focused on researching what influence animated cartoons have on students’ pronunciation of sounds /θ/, /ð/, /d/, /t/, and /Id/. This research work had a quantitative approach and a pre-experimental design. The population for this research was 39 students from first semester from Universidad Técnica de Ambato. A pre-test and on pronunciation was applied. It was designed by the researcher. It contained a paragraph and10 items to evaluate how students pronounced different sounds. Moreover, five interventions of 30 minutes were carried out by using the Communicative Language Teaching Approach. These sessions contained cartoons and pronunciation techniques such as drilling, substitution drilling, open pair drilling and taping students’ English. After finishing the interventions, the same test was taken as a post-test. Furthermore, IBM SPSS statistical software was used for the analysis and data collection. The mean of the pre-test was 4,38; while the post-test mean was 6,51. Thus, a difference of 2,13 points out of ten was evidenced when comparing the pre-test results with the post-test ones. Therefore, it was proved that students before the treatment had a low-level regarding pronunciation. On the other hand, students got an intermediate level after finishing the interventions. While at the beginning, they did not differentiate the three allomorphs that /-ed/ has, at the end, they were able to differentiate them. Something similar happened with /th/ sounds. Before the treatment, they pronounced /t/ instead of /th/ sound. However, after the treatment, they were able to pronounce voiceless and voiced /th/ sound properly.