AN ANALYSIS OF PRE-SERVICE ENGLISH LANGUAGE TEACHERS’ AWARENESS OF SPELLING RULES AND VARIATIONS IN PRONUNCIATION OF POSSESSIVE CASE

This study primarily investigated to what extent Turkish pre-service English Language Teaching (ELT) teachers were aware of the spelling rules and pronunciation variations of the possessive case in English. The study involved the voluntary participation of ten undergraduate students who were the 4th year students in the department of ELT in a state university in Turkey. Basing on a one group pretest posttest research design, the study investigated whether there were any changes in the participants’ awareness of the spelling rules and pronunciation variations of the possessive case after a remedial teaching designed to increase the participants’ awareness. The data were collected by the means of quantitative methods and analyzed employing non-parametric tests on the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) 17.0 due to the small sample size in the study. The findings showed that the spelling and pronunciation of possessive case might be problematic for the pre-service ELT teachers, yet that the problems are likely to be overcome through the class instruction which is designed intentionally to increase the instructors’ awareness. The findings from the current study give a valuable insight into the necessity of attention on the instruction of spelling and pronunciation awareness for pre-service ELT teachers.

Keywords

Possessive case, English Language, Spelling Rules, Variations in Pronunciation