PREDICTING PRONUNCIATION ACCURACY IN A 2ND LANGUAGE - THE ROLE OF PHONOLOGICAL AWARENESS

A positive relationship between English phoneme deletion skill, a meas ure of the theoretical construct phonological awareness, and pronuncia tion accuracy, the ability to read aloud correctly familiar English wo rds, was found in two groups of Hong Kong high school students (7th an d 10th graders) who learned English as a second language. English sigh t vocabulary was also found to be predictive of pronunciation accuracy for the 10th but not for the 7th graders. The present findings are un derstood in light of the well-documented relationship between phonolog ical awareness and reading accuracy in the reading literature (e.g., L eather & Henry, 1994; Gathercole, Willis & Baddeley, 1991). Their impl ications for second language education are also discussed.