Summary of "Podcasting: an effec

This paper reviewed the previous studies that showed the second language learners’ raising awareness of pronunciation and foreign language teachers are often challenged by the ongoing debate on how to teach pronunciation across proficiency levels, with the development of technology, especially the use of podcasts can offer opportunities  for contextualizing tasks, while at the same time honing pronunciation, because of their simplicity in creating, editing, publishing, listening them and their rising popularity. Since some researchers found that output was essential for second language learners, teachers should have students listen to themselves as they edit their output, and then go back, listen again, and revise as necessary, they can also receive feedback from other students and their instructors, podcasts exactly play this role in the process, and the author also suggest teachers to introduce some tasks in the process, such as audio diaries, conducting interviews with native speakers, hosting talk shows, providing speech samples and so on. But is it effective? Then the researcher conducted a research using mixed methodology design to test its effectiveness. The results show that there were no consistent significant differences from the pre-to the post-test, over time, or between tasks, but students reported that they appreciated completing tasks that focus on pronunciation and they recognized the value of the podcasting for promoting pronunciation. But why the results can’t meet the expectation, the researcher gave some suggestions: podcasting and repeated recordings alone are not enough to improve pronunciation over an academic semester, if teachers hope the improvements, then it requires more focused and consistent pronunciation practice in class or meetings outside with a NS in addition to the assigned tasks; another supplement to podcasting could be computer-assistant visual feedback. With the supplementary, maybe the podcasting can play a more effective role in the improvement of pronunciation of second language learners.