This paper looked at the effect of L1 English transfer on the acquisition of L2 French nasal vowels and differences in performance between informal and formal tasks. The results showed that speakers had consistent difficulties with /ɛ̃/, but generally there were greater transfer effects in oral/informal tasks than reading/formal tasks. Moreover, when tested over time, those performing reading tasks showed greater improvement in pronunciation than those performing oral tasks. These results were due to the fact that nasalization is unmarked in English and occurs as a result of coarticulation while it is phonemic in French. While it is interesting that the students performing reading tasks showed greater improvement over time, she neglected to mention the fact that formal contexts produce more careful pronunciation even in native speakers while in informal contexts speakers produce comparatively more coarticulation, reduction, etc. Perhaps some of the differences between the two groups was due to the usual differences of reading aloud vs speaking naturally.
This paper is about how transfer works on L1 English L2 French students in terms of French nasal vowels. He looks at the difference in students’ performance between oral/informal and reading/formal tasks. It is understandable that L2 learners tend to rely on knowledge of their first language in oral tasks because we cannot see language in written form when we do oral tasks. I might make more mistakes when I speak in English compared to when I read or write.
Pronunciation is very important in the L2 learning. I agree that this area remained neglected in the so called “grammar translation”. We used to have a special course dedicated only for teaching pronunciation of phonemes. Some students found it hard to acquire because negative transfer in pronunciation from L1 to L2 has become usual especially in producing features that do not exist in their L1. I also believe that intonation should have been included in teaching pronunciation for L2 learners – which is probably not the case in many pedagogical methods- because different intonations may change the meaning of the same phrase.
This paper discussed L1 English/L2 French acquisition of French nasals. Two experiments were conducted. The first sampled students taking second semester French. The students in the study, taped in four, 20 minute sessions, had to speak a set of sentences that contained French nasal vowels. The second experiment contained 48 students. These students participated in three additional sessions where cued recall was used. The results of the studies indicated that L2 French learners had low accuracy when it came to pronunciation of nasals, yet they excelled at reading tasks. The longer period of study experienced by the students in the 2nd experiment helped students with the pronunciation of nasals in reading. The students in the experiments had particular trouble with the ɛ̃ vowel.
This paper reminds me a lot of when I was learning French back in high school. French pronunciation was a big interest of mine because I really liked the sound, but was also a huge struggle. I especially had difficulty distinguishing the nasal vowels (un, ein, ain, ent). And unfortunately, our teacher didn’t emphasize that much on pronunciation. We were already struggling with the grammar anyway, so we didn’t put too much focus on correct pronunciation. I guess this was one of the reasons I gave up French – my frustration with the pronunciation.
I believe in the importance of pronunciation and it does not only apply to French – although it is more prominent in French because of the large gap between its oral and written code and that it has a lot of nasal sounds – but it also applies to other languages. The paper talked about the grammar/translation method of foreign language teaching that focuses on reading and translation but does not pay so much attention on pronunciation. Sadly, I think this method is still the most common and widely used nowadays to teach foreign language, English especially. At least that is how it is in Asia, as far as I know. Many language teachers don’t put much emphasis on reading aloud or pronunciation practices. We tend to focus only on teaching grammar. As long as the students understand the meaning and can use the language properly, it doesn’t matter even if they have bad pronunciation. That is the common view, more or less. I wish more and more teachers would put more focus on pronunciation and incorporate the audiolingual method in their pedagogy. I agree with Dansereau in the paper that a communicative/proficiency oriented classroom required phonological instruction.
I also still believe that adult learners are capable of native-like fluency and intelligibility in pronunciation if they are given the right instruction in L2. The paper mentioned the study by Bongaert that indicated this possibility.
Nasalization in French is hugely important to its phonetics. This paper was interesting in that it looked more at phonetic acquisition than some of the other papers we have read in class. It gave a brief overview of different teaching methods and how phonetics is dealt with. From this paper, it seems that more emphasis needs to be placed on phonetics in the classroom as an accompaniment of other skills like reading and writing.
This paper presented an experiment done testing L1 english speakers learning L2 french. It showed that they tended to assimilate their nasals with the following sound, but native french speakers don’t actually do that.
This article was particularly relevant to me because I was taking french for the first time this semester, and I definitely struggled with pronunciation. I also took a spanish phonetics course this semester and it really helped me a lot with my spanish pronunciation because there are just some sounds that are hard for people to acquire unless they are given explicit instruction on how to make them.
Transfer of L1 phoneme into L2 production seems to be very common. Personally, I can say if the L2 English speaker whether he/she is German, French, Turk or Arab. And that is from the negative transfer, for example, of the /ð/ in Germans production, the production of /v/ (w) in Turk’s production, the nasalization in French, /b/ or /p/ production in Arabic speakers. I wonder what would be helpful for acquisition the proper production; is long term practice and instruction will be useful in this regard! Or it is just a matter of biological aspect, which I doubt to be correct. However, I know some students that too quite long time to produce some L2 phonemes that do not exist in L1 and they could not though four years. Does long term experiment have influence to get different results!
I agree that phonology should be taught in the classroom because it’s an important part of learning the L2. For example in Spanish they way vowels and consonants are pronounced aid in the correct spelling of words so this can help students if they are aware of the phonology of the language. Unfortunately, as Cindy has already mentioned most foreign language classrooms don’t include teaching the phonological system. Perhaps there should be an elementary course design specifically on phonological contrasts of the language before students move on to upper level courses.
This paper looked at the effect of L1 English transfer on the acquisition of L2 French nasal vowels and differences in performance between informal and formal tasks. The results showed that speakers had consistent difficulties with /ɛ̃/, but generally there were greater transfer effects in oral/informal tasks than reading/formal tasks. Moreover, when tested over time, those performing reading tasks showed greater improvement in pronunciation than those performing oral tasks. These results were due to the fact that nasalization is unmarked in English and occurs as a result of coarticulation while it is phonemic in French. While it is interesting that the students performing reading tasks showed greater improvement over time, she neglected to mention the fact that formal contexts produce more careful pronunciation even in native speakers while in informal contexts speakers produce comparatively more coarticulation, reduction, etc. Perhaps some of the differences between the two groups was due to the usual differences of reading aloud vs speaking naturally.
This paper focused on English L1 speakers’ proficiency in French nasal vowels. The study researched whether L2 learners had more difficulty in different setting (informal vs. formal). The first study was four video taped sessions with nasalization as the dependent variable. Nasal vowels are more marked, previous research has also shown L2 learners have had difficulty with them, and English assimilates the nasal to the following consonant while French does not assimilate the vowel. Therefore, the study had nasalization as the dependent variable. The second study was a set of video taped sessions over a period of three weeks with time as the dependent variable. The studies found that English L1 speakers had more difficulty with nasal vowels in informal settings than formal/reading setting. The results also show students had problems distinguishing between /a/ and /o/ in formal tasks while they had issues with /É›/ in formal tasks. The researcher attributed the trouble with /É›/ to the many orthographic variants, i.e. ain, aim, ien, éen, un, un. This study highlights the differences between reading and speaking. In reading, students often speak more carefully. My pronunciation of ‘ayin (Ê•) becomes more native-like when reading rather than speaking Arabic.
This paper is about how transfer works on L1 English L2 French students in terms of French nasal vowels. He looks at the difference in students’ performance between oral/informal and reading/formal tasks. It is understandable that L2 learners tend to rely on knowledge of their first language in oral tasks because we cannot see language in written form when we do oral tasks. I might make more mistakes when I speak in English compared to when I read or write.
Pronunciation is very important in the L2 learning. I agree that this area remained neglected in the so called “grammar translation”. We used to have a special course dedicated only for teaching pronunciation of phonemes. Some students found it hard to acquire because negative transfer in pronunciation from L1 to L2 has become usual especially in producing features that do not exist in their L1. I also believe that intonation should have been included in teaching pronunciation for L2 learners – which is probably not the case in many pedagogical methods- because different intonations may change the meaning of the same phrase.
This paper discussed L1 English/L2 French acquisition of French nasals. Two experiments were conducted. The first sampled students taking second semester French. The students in the study, taped in four, 20 minute sessions, had to speak a set of sentences that contained French nasal vowels. The second experiment contained 48 students. These students participated in three additional sessions where cued recall was used. The results of the studies indicated that L2 French learners had low accuracy when it came to pronunciation of nasals, yet they excelled at reading tasks. The longer period of study experienced by the students in the 2nd experiment helped students with the pronunciation of nasals in reading. The students in the experiments had particular trouble with the ɛ̃ vowel.
This paper reminds me a lot of when I was learning French back in high school. French pronunciation was a big interest of mine because I really liked the sound, but was also a huge struggle. I especially had difficulty distinguishing the nasal vowels (un, ein, ain, ent). And unfortunately, our teacher didn’t emphasize that much on pronunciation. We were already struggling with the grammar anyway, so we didn’t put too much focus on correct pronunciation. I guess this was one of the reasons I gave up French – my frustration with the pronunciation.
I believe in the importance of pronunciation and it does not only apply to French – although it is more prominent in French because of the large gap between its oral and written code and that it has a lot of nasal sounds – but it also applies to other languages. The paper talked about the grammar/translation method of foreign language teaching that focuses on reading and translation but does not pay so much attention on pronunciation. Sadly, I think this method is still the most common and widely used nowadays to teach foreign language, English especially. At least that is how it is in Asia, as far as I know. Many language teachers don’t put much emphasis on reading aloud or pronunciation practices. We tend to focus only on teaching grammar. As long as the students understand the meaning and can use the language properly, it doesn’t matter even if they have bad pronunciation. That is the common view, more or less. I wish more and more teachers would put more focus on pronunciation and incorporate the audiolingual method in their pedagogy. I agree with Dansereau in the paper that a communicative/proficiency oriented classroom required phonological instruction.
I also still believe that adult learners are capable of native-like fluency and intelligibility in pronunciation if they are given the right instruction in L2. The paper mentioned the study by Bongaert that indicated this possibility.
Nasalization in French is hugely important to its phonetics. This paper was interesting in that it looked more at phonetic acquisition than some of the other papers we have read in class. It gave a brief overview of different teaching methods and how phonetics is dealt with. From this paper, it seems that more emphasis needs to be placed on phonetics in the classroom as an accompaniment of other skills like reading and writing.
This paper presented an experiment done testing L1 english speakers learning L2 french. It showed that they tended to assimilate their nasals with the following sound, but native french speakers don’t actually do that.
This article was particularly relevant to me because I was taking french for the first time this semester, and I definitely struggled with pronunciation. I also took a spanish phonetics course this semester and it really helped me a lot with my spanish pronunciation because there are just some sounds that are hard for people to acquire unless they are given explicit instruction on how to make them.
Transfer of L1 phoneme into L2 production seems to be very common. Personally, I can say if the L2 English speaker whether he/she is German, French, Turk or Arab. And that is from the negative transfer, for example, of the /ð/ in Germans production, the production of /v/ (w) in Turk’s production, the nasalization in French, /b/ or /p/ production in Arabic speakers. I wonder what would be helpful for acquisition the proper production; is long term practice and instruction will be useful in this regard! Or it is just a matter of biological aspect, which I doubt to be correct. However, I know some students that too quite long time to produce some L2 phonemes that do not exist in L1 and they could not though four years. Does long term experiment have influence to get different results!
I agree that phonology should be taught in the classroom because it’s an important part of learning the L2. For example in Spanish they way vowels and consonants are pronounced aid in the correct spelling of words so this can help students if they are aware of the phonology of the language. Unfortunately, as Cindy has already mentioned most foreign language classrooms don’t include teaching the phonological system. Perhaps there should be an elementary course design specifically on phonological contrasts of the language before students move on to upper level courses.