Impact of word orthographical form on existent phonological representations in L2 oral acquisition: preliminary results
Résumé
Usually, research in French as a Foreign Language (FFL) gives little importance to the role of written language in oral L2 acquisition (Billières, 2005). With the transition from oral to written language being pushed into the background, the issue of FFL oral acquisition is confined to the notion of phonological deafness (Dupoux & Peperkamp, 2002). However, recent studies showed that written skills are likely to change phonological competence (e.g. Bürki et al., 2012) and orthographical input can facilitate L2 oral production (e.g. Showalter & Hayes-Harb, 2013). Accordingly, we hypothesize contact with written form to help L2 learners modify erroneous or incomplete phonological representations and improve their pronunciation. The study was carried out in 2016 in Rabat (Morocco) on 100 Moroccan native participants, all beginning FFL learners (A1/A2, Conseil de l’Europe, 2001). The participants were split in five groups of 20 L2 learners. Each group performed a different task; T1 - repetition of minimal pairs, T2 - repetition with verbo-tonal pronunciation correction (Renard, 1979), T3 - copy, T4 - vocalized copy and T5 - dictation. Before and after these tasks, all participants completed the same pre- and post-test word repetition task. Each stimulus of the experimental protocol (n=108) contained one of four target vowels in final word position: /ɔ̃/, /ɑ̃/, /i/, /e/. Vowels were selected based on the preliminary corpus analysis of Moroccan students’ written productions (Solier, 2014). We will present findings of the pre- and post-tests pronunciation of target vowels. The comparison between pre- and post-tests results will allow us to determine the benefit of each task. We could then verify if the orthographical word form has an impact on existent phonological representations and therefore on pronunciation accuracy.