The Influence of Metalinguistic Knowledge of Segmental Phonology on the Production of English Vowels By Brazilian Undergraduate Students

Abstract: This article presents data on the production of English vowels [i ɪ ɛ æ u ʊ] by Brazilian English Language Teaching (ELT) undergraduate students before and after taking a course on English Segmental Phonology. Brazilian learners tend to assimilate the contrasts present in [i ɪ], [ɛ æ] and [u ʊ] into the prototypical categories of Brazilian Portuguese [i], [ɛ] and [u], respectively. Thus, this article investigates the influence of receiving explicit metalinguistic instruction of English segmental phonology on the production of the target pairs of vowels. The data analysis is ...