Application of Form-Focused Instruction in English Pronunciation: Examples from Mandarin Learners

Yizhou Lan,Mengjie Wu

doi:10.4236/ce.2013.49b007

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.

Highlights

Pedagogical researchers and practitioners have been searching throughout the past century for an effective method to tackle the “most difficult and persistent part of language learning”, pronunciation
The discussion of pronunciation teaching has come through days of direct method before the reform movement, and developed into behavioral and more cognitive approaches
The acoustic comparison of control (CLT instruction) and experiment (FonF instruction) groups showed that the acoustic improvement patterns are different between the control group and the experiment group

Summary

Introduction

Pedagogical researchers and practitioners have been searching throughout the past century for an effective method to tackle the “most difficult and persistent part of language learning”, pronunciation. The discussion of pronunciation teaching has come through days of direct method before the reform movement, and developed into behavioral (e.g., audiolingualism, Lado, 1964; total physical response, Asher & Price, 1967; Asher, 1969) and more cognitive approaches (e.g., the silent way, Gattegno, 2010; desuggestopedia, Lozanov & Gateva, 1988). Guidelines of CLT-based pronunciation curriculum has always been a blend of both formal and meaningful tasks, as Celce-Murcia (1996) has identified, the major activities in a communicative pronunciation classroom should include “listen and imitate, phonetic training, minimal pair drills, contextualized minimal pairs, visual aids, development approximation drills, reading aloud or recitation” are just echoing back methods used in the behavioral and cognitive times. Foote et al (2013) recently found, through a corpus-based study, that communicative language teaching could be more effective in pronunciation when real-time contextualized feedback is given to students. Giving them form-focused linguistic information will do harm to their motivation and increase anxiety, which will in turn affect learning outcomes (MacIntyre & Gardner, 2006)

Method

Procedure for Tests

Result

General Discussion

Findings

Conclusion