We bring the results of a study on the improvement of Catalan L2 pronunciation by the majority of 60 students on the Teacher Degree Course at the Universitat de Barcelona, based on the use of attractive resources, including ICTs and Kahoot, and following the verbotonal method.
This paper presents the results of a teaching-learning experience with first-year students on the Teacher in Primary Education Degree Course, taking the subject Llengua Catalana per a l'Ensenyament (Catalan Language for Teaching) at UB's Faculty of Education, for whom Catalan is their second language (their first language is Spanish) and who have difficulties pronouncing some of the sounds. We have used the Moodle platform, the website of Catalan sounds (http://www.ub.edu/sonscatala/#.html) and the Kahoot platform, which allow students to work independently, tutored by a professor.
We provide a methodology proposal, modelled on the principles of the verbotonal method, which aims not only to improve the pronunciation of future teachers -in other words, oral productions similar to a native accent- but also their communicative competence. This is based on hearing the sounds in isolation, in utterances and in the context of dialogues, based on videos and audios on Moodle, Kahoot and the website, to develop the ability to distinguish them acoustically. Following this, work is done on imitating and producing these sounds in isolation, in words and in utterances to later integrate them in different communicative contexts.
Activities were developed to perceptively discriminate the sounds and to learn to produce the opening and closing of the vowels [e/ E/] and [o/], the neutral vowel [«], the [z, Z] sound and the lateral sound [ʎ]. These activities were tried out during the 2018-2019 course by 60 students and we have found that a large majority (80%) have considerably improved their pronunciation in one or more aspects.
