Teaching Pronunciation with Phonetics in a Beginner French Course Impact on Sound Discrimination

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Teaching Pronunciation with Phonetics in a
Beginner French CourseImpact on Sound
Discrimination
Jessica Sertling Miller millerjs_at_uwec.edu Caryn
Drewiske drewiscl_at_uwec.edu University of
Wisconsin-Eau Claire
AAAL 2011
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Introduction

• Phonetics taught in advanced classes
• Why not earlier?
• Phonetics in French 101?

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Observations

• Balancing writing speaking
• Challenges time constraints, students varied
  abilities and interest, teachers training, etc.

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Attitudes
Rated as very important by students

• Pronunciation - 90
• Vocabulary - 86
• Grammar - 73
• Culture - 43

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How do we teach pronunciation?
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Phonetics 101 Potential Benefits

• To avoid fossilization
• To apply concepts early on
• To give students learning tools

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Phonetics 101 Potential Drawbacks

• IPA symbols foreign code
• Time-consuming
• Not communicative

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Pedagogical Goals

• Acquisition of fundamental principles
• Intelligibility
• Functionality
• Sound discrimination

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Research Questions

• Explicit instruction positive impact (Elliot
  on Spanish L2 pronunciation, 1997)
• IPA positive impact(Kendrick on English L2
  pronunciation and discrimination, 1997)
• IPA efficient teaching tool(Morin on Spanish
  teaching education, 2007)

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What impact on speaking and listening in a
beginner college French course?
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Experimental Design

• 4 target sets of sounds
• 2 teaching methods
• Counterbalanced groups
• 15-minute lessons, every 2 weeks
• Sound discrimination test after each lesson

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Target Sounds
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Reference Approach

• Comparing contrasting
• Reflection on spelling to sound
• Repetition of sounds
• Written oral application

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Phonetics Approach

• Comparing contrasting (IPA)
• Reflection on spelling to sound
• Articulatory information
• Repetition of sounds
• Written oral application (IPA)

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Results Discrimination
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Among the teaching techniques used by your
instructor this semester, describe one or more
that you feel helped improve your listening
comprehension of French and explain how it
helped.
Teaching Learning Survey
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Content Analysis
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Discussion

• Explicit instruction preferred by learners
• Phonetic approach is favored by themit
  addresses various learning styles.
• Short-term vs. long-term effect?

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In Support of Phonetics

• Importance of explicit instruction
• IPA shows what is not heard
• Learning tool notes, dictionaries
• Assessment tool written and oral exams

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Conclusion

• Two ways of approaching instruction
• What matters drawing attention
• Phonetics 101 to prepare for 300 level

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Learners Comments

• The handouts describing the differences in
  pronunciation (...) were very helpful. Rather
  than overwhelming the class with all sorts of
  pronunciation rules, it focused in on some of the
  most important and allowed us to directly compare
  two (or more) commonly mispronounced sounds.
• I thought when we used the phonetic symbols with
  different words such as vous and vu, and the
  teacher explained the difference between them,
  was very helpful to me.

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Learners Comments

• I think the phonetics alphabet helped me.
  Sometimes you look at a word and trying to
  pronounce it seems overwhelming, but having it
  written in only phonetics tells you exactly what
  sounds to make.
• (...) I would have liked to spend more time with
  pronunciation. For example, doing more exercises
  with different partners, or going over some of
  the more difficult words for 5 mins. at the
  beginning of each class period.

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Future Research

• Exploring current pedagogies
• Designing communicative tasks using IPA

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Thank You!

• UW-System Leadership Site for the Scholarship of
  Teaching and Learning
• UW-System Office of Professional and
  Instructional Development
• UW-Eau Claire Summer Research Experiences for
  Undergraduates
• UW-Eau Claire Student Differential Tuition Funds
• UW-Eau Claire Center for Excellence in Teaching
  and Learning