Mitigating negative transference in foreign language articulatory phonetics: Revisiting explicit instruction

Abstract

The development of oral communication competence is acknowledged as generally overlooked or misunderstood in the literature. The aim of this article is to discuss results from an investigation into the use of explicit instruction as a pedagogical approach to mitigate pronunciation interference among third-year university students learning Spanish as a second-language. Two groups were formed: an experimental group, which received explicit phonetic instruction, and a second group, which served as the control group. Three raters independently evaluated phonetic accuracy in pretest and post-test sessions. Results suggest that pronunciation instruction leads to statistically significant improvement with regard to syllabification, prosodic stress, natural reading speed, intonation patterns, and the pronunciation of rhotic, voiced stop, approximant, and fricative consonants. Results also indicate that the assessment tools developed in this study are appropriate for measuring the overall enhancement of Spanish pronunciation accuracy, and could therefore be used in the foreign language classroom.