The use of ICT and the production of audiovisual remixes as meaningful contexts where pronunciation can be effectively integrated into language teaching in tertiary education

Mar del Plata

Jornada; V Jornadas Internacionales de Fonética y Fonología y I Jornadas Nacionales de Fonología y Discurso; 2017

Facultad de Humanidades y Ciencias de la Educación, Universidad Nacional de Mar del Plata

Tertiary level English teaching training courses in the province of Cordoba are regulated by the Ministry of Education and its Higher Education Area?Dirección general de Educación Superior (DGES). This area, in turn, is in charge of the design of the guidelines for each teaching training course. In the year 2013, DGES laid down a new array of guidelines for the new profiles of graduates and course programmes. Since then, it is of mandatory participation for students in each year to comply with the requirements for at least two integrative workshops a year. Every workshop relates three or four subjects or seminars per course year, and as of first year, there are two compulsory workshops for both teachers and students taking up Phonetics I, Discursive Practices, Teaching Practice I and Educational Socio-Anthropology (Diseño, 2013: 20). The specific -and flexible- guidelines for the integrative workshops in first year demand and suggest the integration of different sources of input and knowledge, listening and reading comprehension, and oral and written productions in order to encourage effective learning emerging from the four subject areas mentioned above (Diseño, 2013: 38). Also, morphological, syntactic, and phonological components of the language must be integrated in these workshops. It can usually become rather difficult to balance different subjects and skills out, and phonetics can easily get somehow neglected in the way, unless the activities proposed are carefully designed to effectively and meaningfully facilitate pronunciation training. This paper will explore the possibilities of meaningfully integrated pronunciation training brought about by mobile learning, OERs and the production of audiovisual remixes in the context of an integrative workshop in tertiary education. Besides the provision of a sound context for pronunciation training, comments will also be made in terms of effective trans-disciplinary integration and higher levels of student participation and motivation.