For many researchers in the social sciences, including those in applied linguistics, the term ethics evokes the bureaucratic process of fulfilling the requirements of an ethics review board (e.g., in the US, an Institutional Review Board, or IRB) as a preliminary step in conducting human subjects research. The expansion of ethics review boards into the social sciences in the early 2000s has led applied linguistics as a field to experience what Haggerty (2004) termed ethics creep, a simultaneous expansion and intensification of external regulation of research activities. The aims of these ethical review boards are: (a) to evaluate the types and risk of harm to participants as a result of research activities, (b) ensure that participants can give informed consent to be part of the research activities, and (c) provide oversight on researcher procedures to maintain participant anonymity/confidentiality (Haggerty, 2004).
This study examined the impact of learner background on pronunciation development in the context of IELTS exam performance. Participants were 52 adult Korean EFL students enrolled in IELTS preparation classes. They completed the official IELTS exam before and after a 12-week preparation course, along with pre-, weekly, and post-surveys about their background and language learning habits. Key learner background factors (prior English study, desired IELTS scores, program attendance, mock exam scores, perceived progress in English/IELTS, and instrumental motivation for studying IELTS) were measured as potential predictors of pronunciation development on the monologic IELTS speaking task. Multiple regression analyses revealed program attendance and mock exams to be the strongest predictors of pronunciation feature development. These results offer promising implications for classroom language learning in the EFL context.
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