From prosodic skills to L2 reading proficiency: an experimental approach to L2 phonetics teaching methods

Charlotte Alazard (1) , Corine Astésano (1) , Michel Billières (1)

1 Octogone-Lordat - Unité de Recherche Interdisciplinaire Octogone-Lordat

This paper aims at testing the positive incidence of oral skills’ training on reading abilities for English learners of French as a Foreign Language. A recent preliminary study indicates that emphasis on the assimilation of the L2 prosodic system - especially at an early stage of the learning process - not only improves students’ oral fluency but also allows them to develop L2 (prosodic) strategies to decode written speech [2]. In the present study, we follow up on these results on a larger-scale longitudinal study, designed to systematically compare the impact of two phonetics’ teaching methods on reading skills for L2 learners of French: the Articulatory Method (AM) and the Verbo-Tonal Method (VTM). Our data, still under statistical analyses, already show the same tendencies as in the previous study, which is a strong correlation between L2 reading fluency and L2 prosodic skills.

Keywords: prosodic transfers; reading proficiency; L2 acquisition; Verbo-Tonal Method

Domains: Linguistics

Charlotte Alazard, Corine Astésano, Michel Billières. From prosodic skills to L2 reading proficiency: an experimental approach to L2 phonetics teaching methods. Methods in L2 Prosody 2012, May 2012, Padoue, Italy. ⟨hal-02159057⟩