A STUDY OF IMITATING ENGLISH NATIVE LANGUAGE SPEAKER’S PRONUNCIATION TO IMPROVE ENGLISH SPEAKING ABILITY OF THAI STUDENTS IN THE FACULTY OF ENGINEERING, KASETSART UNIVERSITY
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Abstract
This research presented a study of imitating English native language speaker’s pronunciation to improve English speaking ability of Thai students. The objective was to investigate and assess their English pronunciation and intonation based on an imitating English native language speaker’s pronunciation technique. The research instruments included twenty speech records of Thai undergraduate and graduate students in the Faculty of Engineering, Kasetsart University and one speech record of native English teacher at the Kasetsart University Laboratory School, Kasetsart University.
Results indicated that most Thai student participants in this study used the falling intonation in yes/no questions. There existed some differences in the English pronunciation and sentence intonation before and after listening to the English native language speaker. The speech signal and sentence intonation exhibited a rising pattern imitating native language speaker and tended to improve with the number of times listened. The study also showed that the English native language speaker’s pronunciation technique could improve English speaking ability of Thai student participants in this research. However, the level of improvement gained varied depending on each participant. In addition, a few pronunciation mistakes were found in the following words: drive, nephew, lorry, Thursday, with etc. Finally, the researchers have proposed some guidelines for developing and preparing English speaking and communication skills of Thai engineering students for their future professional engineer in ASEAN.
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