Second Language Acquisition and Effective Communication — Presentation Detail — Celebration of Scholars

Instructions

Student presentations must have a faculty sponsor.

Abstracts must include a title and a description of the research, scholarship, or creative work. The description should be 150-225 words in length and constructed in a format or style appropriate for the presenter’s discipline.

The following points should be addressed within the selected format or style for the abstract:

A clear statement of the problem or question you pursued, or the scholarly goal or creative theme achieved in your work.
A brief comment about the significance or uniqueness of the work.
A clear description of the methods used to achieve the purpose or goals for the work.
A statement of the conclusions, results, outcomes, or recommendations, or if the work is still in progress, the results you expect to report at the event.

Presenter photographs should be head and shoulder shots comparable to passport photos.

Additional Information

More information is available at carthage.edu/celebration-scholars/. The following are members of the Research, Scholarship, and Creativity Committee who are eager to listen to ideas and answer questions:

Jun Wang
Kim Instenes
John Kirk
Nora Nickels
Andrew Pustina
James Ripley

Second Language Acquisition and Effective Communication

Name: Celine Bazin
Major: Education
Hometown: Caen
Faculty Sponsor:
Other Sponsors:
Type of research: Master's thesis

Abstract

SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION AND EFFECTIVE COMMUNICATION: Phonetics instructions to help French L2 learners improve their oral performances

The purpose of the current study is to find efficient ways to help students improve their French pronunciation within a communication-oriented language classroom. As far as second language acquisition and comprehensible output are concerned, there is a myriad of article mainly quantitative, analyzing students’ performances, but the analysis of students’ experiences and feelings as regard as the various activities foreign-language teachers use in their classrooms seems to suffer from a serious neglect.

Thus, this study consists first in a pretest-posttest analysis of students performances before and after phonetics instructions and aims at exploring students’ perceptions of French phonetic instructions, to know whether they found them useful or not and if they would have preferred other activities to improve their pronunciation of the target language. What were their first impressions when they first encountered French phonetics? How would they describe them? Do they think about any other activity that could help them produce a more comprehensible output?

For the purpose of this study, a quantitative analysis as well as a phenomenological qualitative design was used. Indeed, the researcher first taught phonetics to her 1021 students and then interviewed them (16 students aged 18 to 21) studying Elementary French 1010 in a Liberal Arts College. First of all, students’ French pronunciation was checked through a posttest, then they received French phonetics instructions throughout the second-half of the Fall semester and at the very end of the semester, the researcher gave them a posttest and interviewed them separately in order to have a better understanding of her students’ perceptions of this activity, to know if they would have liked something different to help them etc.

As far as the results are concerned, the pretest-posttest analysis revealed a general improvement of the students’ French pronunciation and the researcher could identify some recurrent themes in the students’ answers given during the interview. One of those themes is a shared perceived challenge during the first class introducing phonetics – that is to say – to learn all of this new alphabet and being able to properly read it while being already struggling and overwhelmed by the learning of a new language. Then, there is also a perceived improvement of their French pronunciation which encourages them to be more self-confident and more eager to participate in class. Finally, apart from phonetics instructions, repetition exercises also appeared to be perceived as a very helpful way to improve their pronunciation.

For future studies, it would be very interesting to do a comparative analysis of French pronunciation between students learning French at an elementary level and advanced students, and also to compare their feeling towards those instructions. Would the motivation and self-confidence in speaking the target language of advanced students increase or decrease after those instructions ?

Poster file