Enseñanza de la pronunciación de la lengua extranjera a través de tecnologías asequibles y de fácil accesopodcasts, aplicaciones móviles y redes sociales (twitter)

Zusammenfassung

Abstract The aim of this dissertation is to explore the potential of affordable and easily accessible technologies for foreign language (FL) pronunciation training, namely podcasts, smartphone apps and social networking services (with a focus on Twitter). The dissertation presents three main studies, each of them addressing the potential of one of the aforementioned technologies empirically to improve the learners' perception and production of certain pronunciation aspects. The studies follow a mixed-methods design, with pre- and post-tests aimed at evaluating the learners' pronunciation of the target features before and after receiving instruction. Additionally, questionnaires were administered in each study in order to learn about the participants' familiarity with the tools used, gather demographic data, as well as to canvass their opinions towards the approach adopted and the adequacy of each tool for pronunciation training. In order to test the potential of the above-mentioned tools, a number of aspects challenging for FL learners were selected. Study 1 addressed podcasts' potential to improve the English /s - z/ contrast and /b d g/ as stops in intervocalic position (chapter IV). Study 2 investigates the potential of the English File Pronunciation (EFP) app (OUP, 2012) to improve English vowels /æ/, /??/, /?/ and /?/, and the /s - z/ contrast (chapter V). Finally, study 3 weighs Twitter's potential to improve the learners' pronunciation of lexical items that are often mispronounced by EFL learners due to difficult sound-spelling correspondences or cognates in English and Spanish with different stress patterns (chapter VI). Training in study 1 exploited podcasts' potential for input provision, fostering learners' output and peer evaluation. Participants were divided into two groups that acted as experimental and control groups simultaneously, as each group received instruction on a different aspect (G1 /s - z/; G2 /b d g/). The results reveal that instruction had a beneficial effect on the learners' perception and production of the target aspects for which they received training, although not for every target sound. In study 2, participants, divided into three groups, were required to use the EFP app for around 20 minutes a day over a period of two weeks. Participants from G1 and G2 were recruited from the same degree in English studies as participants from study 1. Participants from G3 were enrolled on various compulsory EFL courses from different degrees. G1 and G3 acted as experimental groups and G2 acted as control. Nonetheless, after the experimental groups finished training, G2 started receiving instruction, therefore also serving as experimental, though only for perception. The results show that the app-based training had a positive effect on the learners' perception and production of the target sounds, although the benefits obtained from instruction did not reach statistical significance for every sound or group. Finally, instruction in study 3 consisted in sending learners daily tweets with concise explicit explanations about the above-mentioned aspects. Participants were recruited from the first year of a degree in Medicine. Students in the experimental group received tweets dealing with the pronunciation targets, while participants in the control group received a tip of the day covering aspects of English on a range of topics other than pronunciation. The results reveal that participants receiving instruction through Twitter improved their pronunciation of the target words significantly and retained this improvement a month after training. Overall, the findings in this dissertation are interpreted to be encouraging since, despite the fact that instruction through these tools did not foster significant improvements for all the target aspects, participants made substantial progress in every study despite the extremely short period of instruction.