Application of Form-Focused Instruction in English Pronunciation: Examples from Mandarin Learners

Yizhou Lan, Mengjie Wu

Department of Chinese, Translation and Linguitiscs, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China.
Department of the Chinese Language, Beijing Language and Culture University, Beijing, China.

DOI: 10.4236/ce.2013.49B007                

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.

Keywords

Pronunciation Pedagogy; Second Language Speech Production; Communicative Language Teaching; Focus on Form

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

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