Designing and evaluating an e-teaching package of English phonetics and pronunciation for pre-service teachers

Online pronunciation teaching becomes particularly challenging because of the distance between teachers and students, and the lack of interactions, feedback and supervision (Dumford & Miller, 2018). The study aims to describe the process of designing an e-teaching package on English phonetics and pronunciation course for pre-service teachers in Hong Kong, and to evaluate the effectiveness of this online teaching package. Thirty-nine pre-service teachers divided into the control group (CG) and experimental group (EG) attended five training sessions on Zoom, an online conference platform. Participants in the CG received traditional Powerpoint lectures with pre-set Zoom functions for interaction, while participants in the EG received training with an e-package of Edpuzzle, Nearpod, Padlet, Mentimeter and Kahoot. Pretest–posttest designs and questionnaire were employed to evaluate students’ pronunciation improvement and their attitudes towards the e-package. Results showed that participants from both groups made fewer errors on English consonants and vowels after the training sessions. 80% of the participants in the EG agreed that the e-package was well-designed and could make the online instruction more interactive compared with the traditional online instruction. 75% of them reported that they received more feedback when the e-package was applied. 45% of the participants reported that their favorite e-tool was Edpuzzle. This tool not only helped them review and consolidate the content knowledge but provided more input for them to identify their pronunciation errors. As for two online quizzes, students showed more interest in Kahoot as it was more competitive compared with the individualized quiz using Nearpod. Copyright © 2021 International Conference on Learning and Teaching.