A Consideration of Students’ Proficiency in Discriminating Phonetic Symbols

This study investigates university English majors’ competency in decoding phonetic symbols by analyzing the results of a written test from a phonetics course. The students tried acquiring basic knowledge of vowels, consonants, and suprasegmental phonemes by several strategies including: learning the mechanism of phonetics based on the technical terms; practicing reading phonetic symbols; investigating the pronunciation of loanwords in Japanese and English; pair speaking practice; and recording monologue shadowing throughout the semester. At the end of the course, students took a final examination consisting of various types of questions. The examinations were held in January from 2016 to 2019 with 172 students participating over the four years. This study considers examinees’ answers from four sections of the test: differentiating phonemes in minimal pairs by listening, identifying a common phoneme in a group of three words, understanding alliteration and rhyme, and transcribing phonetic symbols into the English alphabet. The test results show the students’ comprehension and tendencies, namely, their strengths and weaknesses. These can be analyzed according to the phonemes themselves, including such elements as places or manners of articulation. This research also offers suggestions as to what students should pay careful attention to while learning English and what effective strategies they can use.