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

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.