Abstract:

Foreign language pronunciation is often formally trained through exercises in course books for general language courses. The exercises generally follow one of two dominant approaches:
(1) training of a particular pronunciation feature within a unit on a selected group of unrelated words meeting the goal of pronunciation instruction, or
(2) repetition of pronunciation of a particular vocabulary set used in a course book unit.

Lexical units belonging to the lexical field of academic vocabulary allow readers and writers of academic texts to operate and communicate in research fields across various disciplines but are relatively rarely used in other types of texts. In addition, this vocabulary is presented to its users mainly in specialized courses, as academics tend to focus on acquiring language relevant to their field of study. Therefore, users of academic vocabulary are familiarised with these words incidentally through exposure to written academic texts without a pronunciation model. As a result, the pronunciation of these words may be erroneous.

The presented study aims to categorize the common pronunciation mistakes in academic vocabulary units observed in spontaneous utterances by undergraduate learners of English in the academic context and subsequently provide a suggestion for applying language learning strategies for acquiring the pronunciation of words through exposure to academic texts.

Acknowledgement:
The paper presents partial research outcomes of the projects 10/TU/2022 Learning strategies in developing communication competence and 019TTU-4/2021 Introducing new digital tools into teaching and research within transdisciplinary philology study programmes.

Keywords:

Academic vocabulary, pronunciation, language learning strategies.