Points to Remember and Ways to Use Teaching Materials
in Training Pronunciation
for Pupils Equipped with Cochlear Implant

Yasuto ITABASHI

I researched the shift in articulation scores in speech production of the ten pupils equipped with a Cochlear Implant (CI), and the accuracy of pronunciation of /s/, //, z/, //, /r/ of some pupils using Hearing Aid (HA), with which are generally said to render those words harder to pronounce. The research shows the following findings: 1) the speech accuracy rate of the pupils with a CI is closely linked with the years of CI-use experience, 2) the average accuracy score of CI pupils is almost as high as those of the pupils with HA in elementary school up to three and a half years, but after that the average score of CI pupils rises sharply in tandem with the years of experience, 3) CI pupils have already acquired the pronunciation of vowels and semi vowels with one-and-a-half-year CI experience, forming the basis of various sounds, 4) in terms of syllable, the candidate pupils in this research have clearer “sha” column of Japanese kana syllabary sounds compared to “ka” column ones, 5) the candidate pupils have rather unstable “ra” column sounds, 6) the pupils have difficulty in pronouncing “za” column of kana sounds just as HA pupils do. With these findings, I pointed out that it is important to increase the frequency of speech of each learner in teaching pronunciation to CI pupils, to ask them to mimic model sounds accurately, and to teach them from “listening and speaking” then to “Japanese language acquisition.”

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