Pronunciation teaching practices in communicative second language classes

Abstract

The objective of this research was to provide longitudinal, corpus-based evidence of actual teacher behaviour with respect to the teaching of second language (L2) pronunciation in a communicative language learning context. The data involved 40 hours of videotaped lessons from three experienced teachers recorded four times at 100-hour increments during the 400-hour programme for grade six (11- to 12-year-olds) francophone learners in Quebec, Canada. The videotaped lessons were initially transcribed and coded for individual pronunciation teaching episodes, then analysed in terms of their type, linguistic target and impact. Results demonstrated that pronunciation teaching episodes were infrequent (accounting for 10% of all language-related episodes), that pronunciation teaching targeted individual sounds (to the exclusion of other aspects of pronunciation) and that most pronunciation teaching episodes were not incorporated into lesson plans but instead involved various kinds of corrective feedback in response to individual student errors. These findings, which clarify results of previous survey-based studies of teachers' in-class behaviour, provide evidence that might be used to address teachers' concerns regarding the place, scope and role of pronunciation instruction in L2 teaching and teacher training.

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this article and to the many research assistants who transcribed and assisted with the coding of the original data (reported by Collins et al. 2009): Kathryn MacFadden-Willard, Cassandre McLean Ikauno, Yvette Relkoff, Fabrizio Stendardo and Derek Theriault. This project was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and Fonds Quebecois de la Recherche sur la Societe et la Culture grants awarded to the coauthors.

Notes

1. Canada has two official languages, French and English and the convention is to refer to the teaching of these languages to non-native speakers as second language teaching. However, in some parts of the country, such as the regions in this study, learners typically have little exposure to English outside the classroom, resulting in contexts that have more in common with EFL situations elsewhere in the world.

2. Although at least some outcomes of L2 pronunciation development can be attributed to implicit learning through exposure to high-quality input, it remains unclear whether and to what extent adult learners rely on implicit learning and whether pronunciation teaching activities could harness implicit learning strategies (for preliminary evidence, see Trofimovich, McDonough and Neumann 2013). Therefore, we focus here exclusively on explicit teaching of pronunciation in a classroom context.