Abstract
The perception of foreign sounds is influenced by the phonemic inventory of the mother tongue to a large extent. This paper presents the results of testing the perception of the English mid-central vowel schwa among Czech pupils of two seventh forms at a lower secondary school.
The testing was carried out in February 2009 as the initial phase of a pedagogical experiment which is planned to be terminated in June of the same year. One of the goals of this testing was to discover the extent of perceptual sensitivity of 12 and 13-year-old learners towards the reduced sound schwa which is frequently used in English although it does not occur in standard Czech.
The measuring instrument was devised and piloted within doctoral research, the general focus of which is the effectiveness of teaching pronunciation in the Czech educational environment