The Role of Phonetics and Prosody during a Second Language Learning Plan

Abstract

New technologies have changed the methodology applied to the teaching of foreign languages. Moreover, teachers do not use them sufficiently. The oral language should gain more ground because communication uses speech more than writing. Each language has its phonetic, phonological and prosodic system. These features become important during a foreign language learning process, since the learner tends to assimilate the foreign sound to the sounds of his/her mother tongue because 1) his/her ear is not able to distinguish them, and 2) the brain couples the sound with the written sign. By following a traditional methodology, students achieve an adequate level in constructing correct sentences, but their oral performance remains poor. New technologies help students to practice the new sounds more precisely, thus, provoking the muscle of the phonetic apparatus to become so stretched to be able to produce them easily. Talking in a new language is the equivalent of making a physical exercise; it is a question not only of new commands received by the brain, but also of a flexible vocal tract. It is a physical, psychological and mental process, which, considering Italian and English, becomes even more difficult, because the two alphabets have more or less the same written signs (a,b,c, d, t, etc.). Rather, if we consider an Italian student of Arabic the problems are different for two reasons: 1) the letters, having different shape, avoid overlapping, so that the student 2) has only to develop the muscles for the emphatic and guttural letters (ع غ ص ض ط ظ). His/her mind has not the duty to cancel the sounds of the mother tongue and to substitute them with a new pronunciation. In this study, my challenge is to give much more emphasis to phonetics, phonology, stress and intonation, so to facilitate interaction during a speech act using real and not a limited classroom language. For these reasons, I planned a specific course in pronunciation, helped by spectrographs and laryngographs, for a separate group of students with the purpose to stress phonetics and phonology more than grammar. The results obtained after one year, at last, gave voice to my suppositions. Keywords: methodology, foreign languages, phonetics, phonology, prosody