Rehabilitating Fossilized Consonants through Computer-aided and Animated Material

Although pronunciation is considered critical in successful as well as effective communication, it only receives sporadic regard due to the prevailing factors in language education. Nevertheless, there is now far greater awareness and increasing need amongst language learners regarding the necessity of possessing a good working pronunciation for a successful communication and international intelligibility. In this respect the fossilized pronunciations in the consonants interfere with and severely disrupt the quality of speech. In an attempt to rehabilitate this situation, this research, unlike the traditional one, offers a model of computer-aided and animated material (tool) to provide important assistance on correcting fossilized consonants. This quasi-experimental study involves a pre-posttest design with both an experimental group and a control group composed of 19 and 18 undergraduate Erasmus students respectively. Following a five-week’s treatment, the subjects were tested on general and fossilized consonants. The results indicate that there is a significant difference between the experimental and the control group, meaning that the treatment group which received the computer-aided and animated material far outperformed the control group which received only traditional method