Foreign language learning at school has recently been concerned by pronunciation teaching. Pronunciation is nevertheless rarely taught. L2 teachers do not feel confident to teach L2 pronunciation and ask for teaching methods adapted to the classroom settings. The different existing teaching approaches must be evaluated to support L2 pronunciation teaching.
In the present study, two teaching approaches of L2 French pronunciation are compared in a group of German speaking pupils (n=82; mean age =12;6). Each class was divided into two groups receiving either a communicative or articulatory explicit teaching for a total of four hours. All the L2 French learners were taught about the phonemic contrast between /o/ and /ɔ̃/ and between /ʒ/ and /ʃ/, which have a high functional load in French (Derwing & Munro 2015). The two teaching approaches strongly differ in the involved learning processes.
The communicative and the articulatory teaching methods relied on different learner skills and psycholinguistic processes. Leaners involved in the communicative method had to link semantic representations to phonological ones. Leaners involved in the articulatory method had to link articulatory and phonological representations to orthographic representations. Pronunciation acquisition of the studied phonemic contrasts was evaluated in a pre-/post-test design.
An imitation task including the studied phonemic contrast and distractors was proposed to the pupils. Evaluation of the pupil pronunciation was judged by three French speakers on a five-point Lickert scale graduating phoneme identifiability. Pronunciation's progress was modeled in a robust linear mixed-effect model with random intercepts for participants. After 4 hours of instruction, the two groups have improved by 14% [11; 17] for the two targeted phonemic contrast without a significant difference between the two teaching methods (p> .05). However, the effect of the teaching method is modulated by the phoneme at play (p< .001). Results and their implications are discussed for teacher formation and learning processes.
Derwing, T. M., & Munro, M. J. (2015). Pronunciation fundamentals: Evidence-based perspectives for L2 teaching and research. Amsterdam, The Netherlands: John Benjamins.
