An L2 Pronunciation Judgment Task

As a remedy to what we might call the pronunciation deficit of the communicative approach, many undergraduate Spanish programs across the US offer a course in phonetics and pronunciation in their third or fourth year. An indication of the interest in these types of courses is the number of phonetics / pronunciation textbooks that are available on the market, such as Guitart (2004), Hammond (2001), Quilis and Fernandez (2003), Schwegler, Kempff and Barrutia (2007), Spicher, Sweeney and Pelayo Coutino (2007), Stokes (2005), and Teschner (2000). Of course, not all these textbooks have the same emphasis, and there is great variation with respect to the degree of sophistication of the phonetic and phonological theory that one can find in these textbooks. Nevertheless, all of them have the practical purpose of improving the students’ pronunciation. At the same time that formal training in phonetics and pronunciation has found a way into the Spanish curriculum, there has been an increasing interest in finding out whether such an addition is adequate. One thing is to realize that the communicative approach to language teaching is not very effective at getting the students to pronounce correctly (after all, precise pronunciation is seldom an impediment for successful communication). It is a very different thing is to claim that formal teaching in phonetics can have an impact on improving the students’ pronunciation. For this reason, there have been studies devoted to test whether formal instruction is an effective way of improving the students’ pronunciation. Although the students in a phonetics / pronunciation course might learn about the different modes of articulation or how the concepts of phonemes and allophones help us understand the differences between [s] and [z] in Spanish and English, the question is whether students actually improve in their practical knowledge of the language; that is, whether they put the phonetic theory to use. There are impressionistic data that seem to indicate that the students’ pronunciation of Spanish does not improve after a phonetics class. If there is no improvement at all, it would be difficult to justify the need for this type of course, although not impossible, since one could argue that it is important that students are aware of the phonological properties of the language even if they cannot put them to practice. Many studies that test the effectiveness of formal phonetics seem to indicate that formal training in phonetics has significant positive impact on the students’ pronunciation. (See, for example, Gonzalez-Bueno (1997), Lord (2005), Gaff and Loewen (2007), and Elliott (2003), which provides an overview of L2 studies in the acquisition of phonology.) A notable exception to this is Sutter (1976), who found that having formal training in pronunciation did not correlate with better pronunciation.