Application of Form-Focused Instruction in English Pronunciation: Examples from Mandarin Learners
- 1 Department of Chinese, Translation and Linguitiscs, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China
- 2 Department of the Chinese Language, Beijing Language and Culture University, Beijing, China
Abstract
Training L2 learners’ pronunciation by using a controlled perception procedure has long been the mainstream of L2 speech pedagogy research. However, endeavors have also been done to explore more communicative teaching methods. The current study presents a paradigm that tests both communicative teaching methods’ renderings of pronunciation pedagogy and a form-focused instruction which is less used in pronunciation pedagogy. The authors introduced a focus-on-form method to pronunciation teaching by giving participants information about the speech articulators to help five Mandarin-speaking students to improve the accuracy in production of English /r/. For the sake of contrasting, another group of five students received communicative training for the same amount of time. Stimuli words for both groups in both pre-test and post-test were embedded in a discourse for participants to read aloud. Productions were recorded and went through both acoustic analysis and native speaker perception for the measurement of nativeness. Results showed that the focus-on form method is more effective at least in the presented participants to improve segmental pronunciation performance.
- Asher, J. J. (1969). The total physical response approach to second language learning. The Modern Language Journal, 53, 3-17.
- Asher, J. J., & Price, B. S. (1967). The learning strategy of the total physical response: Some age differences. Child Development, 1219- 1227. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/1127119
- Barrutia, R. (1970). Visual phonetics. The Modern Language Journal, 54, 482-486. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-4781.1970.tb03582.x
- Browman, C. P., & Goldstein, L. (1992). Articulatory phonology: An overview. Phonetica, 49, 155-180. http://dx.doi.org/10.1159/000261913
- Celce-Murcia, M. (1996). Teaching pronunciation audio cassette: A reference for teachers of English to speakers of other languages. New York: Cambridge University Press.
- Derwing, T. M., & Munro, M. J. (2005). Second language accent and pronunciation teaching: A research-based approach. TESOL Quarterly, 39, 379-397. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/3588486
- Doughty, C., & Williams, J. (1998). Focus on form in classroom second language acquisition. New York: Cambridge University Press.
- Flege, J. E. (1987). The production of “new” and “similar” phones in a foreign language: Evidence for the effect of equivalence classification. Journal of Phonetics, 15, 47-65.
- Flege, J. E. (1995). Second language speech learning: Theory, findings, and problems. In W. Strange (Ed.), Speech perception and linguistic experience: Issues in cross-language research, 233-277.
- Foote, J. A., Trofimovich, P., Collins, L., & Urzúa, F. S. (2013). Pronunciation teaching practices in communicative second language classes. The Language Learning Journal, (ahead-of-print), 1-16. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09571736.2013.784345
- Fowler, C. A. (1986). An event approach to the study of speech perception from a direct-realist perspective. Journal of Phonetics, 14, 3-28.
- Gattegno, C. (2010). Teaching foreign languages in schools: The silent way. Educational Solutions World.
- Graham, S., Harris, K. R., & Loynachan, C. (1993). The basic spelling vocabulary list. The Journal of Educational Research, 86, 363-368. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00220671.1993.9941230
- Ingram, D. E. (1974). Beyond audiolingualism—A linguistic and psycholinguistic view. Babel, 10, 9-15.
- Krashen, S. D., & Terrell, T. D. (1988). The natural approach: Language acquisition in the classroom, language teaching methodology series.