TITLE:
Application of Form-Focused Instruction in English Pronunciation: Examples from Mandarin Learners
AUTHORS:
Yizhou Lan, Mengjie Wu
KEYWORDS:
Pronunciation Pedagogy; Second Language Speech Production; Communicative Language Teaching; Focus on Form
JOURNAL NAME:
Creative Education,
Vol.4 No.9B,
September
30,
2013
ABSTRACT: Training L2 learners’ pronunciation by using
a controlled perception procedure has long been the mainstream of L2 speech
pedagogy research. However, endeavors have also been done to explore more communicative
teaching methods. The current study presents a paradigm that tests both
communicative teaching methods’ renderings of pronunciation pedagogy and a
form-focused instruction which is less used in pronunciation pedagogy. The
authors introduced a focus-on-form method to pronunciation teaching by giving
participants information about the speech articulators to help five Mandarin-speaking students to improve the accuracy in
production of English /r/. For the sake of contrasting, another group of five
students received communicative training for the same amount of time. Stimuli
words for both groups in both pre-test and post-test were embedded in a
discourse for participants to read aloud. Productions were recorded and went
through both acoustic analysis and native speaker perception for the measurement
of nativeness. Results showed that the focus-on form method is more effective
at least in the presented participants to improve segmental pronunciation
performance.