Pronunciation is often considered as a neglected area or particularly difficult compared to other domains in Lx teaching and learning. The study will question terminology in the field of Lx pronunciation research in two corpora of scientific papers in French and English in order to understand the specificities of this domain.
Considering pronunciation, as a neglected area of Lx teaching and learning (Wachs, 2011), is the result of a complex epistemological developments in the field of applied linguistics (and linguistique appliquée in French-speaking Europe) which have also influenced language education through a lack of teacher training (Gilakjani et al., 2011). For Sauvage (2019), the origin of this difficult conciliation between phonetics and “la didactique des langues” can be traced to the 1970s when a common ground was still partially found between experimental research and teaching practices within applied phonetics. We consider that there is no clear evidence that pronunciation is more neglected (or important) than any other domain. However, our assumption is that teaching practises may be more oriented towards prescriptive and corrective feedbacks compared to the general language learning practises largely influenced by sociolinguistics since the communicative approach. Previous work (Miras, 2019) on a corpus of French journals has highlighted an overwhelming use of the French term 'correction' that correlates very strongly with the adjective 'phonétique' (similar to its correlation with 'grammatical') in Lx pronunciation research in French. The present study replicates this research with a similar corpus of English-language journals with the goal of comparing the treatment of Lx pronunciation teaching and learning in the two language contexts. Analysis focuses on a number of variables, including the context around uses of “pronunciation” and the semantic prosody of terms such as “foreign accent”. Results will provide an overview of the treatment of pronunciation teaching in key European L2 and FL teaching journals in French and English. This comparison will provide evidence on whether there is a French specificity regarding the way pronunciation is dealt in curricula and thus, if there is a need of redefining terminology in the teaching and learning of pronunciation.
