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Effects of Form‐Focused Instruction and Corrective Feedback on L2 Pronunciation Development of /ɹ/ by Japanese Learners of English
Author(s) -
Saito Kazuya,
Lyster Roy
Publication year - 2012
Publication title -
language learning
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.882
H-Index - 103
eISSN - 1467-9922
pISSN - 0023-8333
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-9922.2011.00639.x
Subject(s) - pronunciation , psychology , generalizability theory , corrective feedback , vowel , notice , formant , linguistics , mathematics education , developmental psychology , philosophy , political science , law
Sixty‐five Japanese learners of English participated in the current study, which investigated the acquisitional value of form‐focused instruction (FFI) with and without corrective feedback (CF) on learners’ pronunciation development. All students received a 4‐hr FFI treatment designed to encourage them to notice and practice the target feature of English /ɹ/ in meaningful discourse, except those in the control group ( n = 11), who received comparable instruction but without FFI on English /ɹ/. During FFI, the instructors provided CF only to students in the FFI + CF group ( n = 29) by recasting their mispronunciation or unclear pronunciation of /ɹ/, whereas no CF was provided to those in the FFI‐only group ( n = 25). Acoustic analyses were conducted on frequency values of the third formant (F3) of English /ɹ/ tokens elicited via pretest and posttest measures targeting familiar items and a generalizability test targeting unfamiliar items. The results showed that: (a) F3 values of the FFI + CF group significantly declined after the intervention, not only at a controlled‐speech level but also a spontaneous‐speech level, regardless of following vowel contexts; (b) change in F3 values of the FFI‐only group and the control group was not statistically significant; and (c) the generalizability of FFI to novel tokens remained unclear.