Abstract

This study explores the effects of second language learners’ Reading Aloud (RA) of texts on their pronunciation. RA has not received much attention in empirical research despite being commonly used in classrooms. The handful of available studies found that RA led to the improvement of L2 learners' pronunciation at the segmental and the suprasegmental levels. The present study contributed to fill this gap in the literature by investigating, using a mixed-methods approach, the effects of RA on the acquisition of the phonemes /p/ and /ɛ/ in the speech of Arab speakers learning English as an L2. Twenty-six adult Arab ESL learners participated in this study. The participants were randomly assigned to a control group and an experimental group. The latter were asked to practice reading written texts out loud to their smartphone devices through automatic speech recognition (ASR) application, which enabled them to monitor their own production and receive instantaneous visual feedback (i.e., in the form of written text). By the end of the experiment, the participants in the treatment group were asked to conduct a one-to-one interview with the researcher on their attitudes towards the usefulness of RA. The pre-test results showed that the participants in both groups had no major difficulties in producing /ɛ/; henceforth, the investigation focused solely on /p/. The treatment group's oral production of /p/ during reading aloud and spontaneous speech tasks significantly improved from the pre-test to the posttest and the delayed post-test.