Bridging the gap between phonemic transcription skills and oral performance: pedagogical proposal based on different learning styles

Villa María

Jornada; IV Jornadas Nacionales de ELT Mixed-ability groups: Teaching and Learning in the ELT Classroom; 2017

Learning a foreign language at higher educational contexts has always posed a series of challenges, especially considering the acquisition of some linguistic aspects such as pronunciation. In fact, the first-year learners of the EFL programmes at the School of Languages, National University of Córdoba, seem to encounter different difficulties as regards the acquisition of phonetics, particularly, in relation to the transition between acquiring transcription skills and identifying the corresponding phonemes in English, and producing them correctly in oral work. This great disparity is evidenced in their performance in the respective forms of formal assessment: a written exam (which entails transcription skills) and an oral exam (which entails reading aloud and retelling a story). Based on the theory proposed by Gimson and Cruttenden (1994), students should use phonemic transcription to represent what is said in spoken language, that is to say, they need to find the correspondence between the sound that is pronounced and its corresponding phoneme, which presents a great challenge for them. For this reason, from the Chair English Pronunciation Practice, a pedagogical proposal has been designed based on different learning styles, understood as the ways in which individuals acquire, retain and retrieve information input (Felder and Henriques, 1995). In this paper, the difficulties that arise when moving from written to oral production in first-year university students are analysed. Then a number of activities aimed at addressing the difficulties identified are described, which could help students associate symbols in phonemic transcription with their respective sounds produced orally. Different learning styles are considered as the point of departure for the creation of these activities. Finally, the pedagogical implications of this proposal are considered, as it is expected that, by employing this comprehensive approach, students can count on alternatives to help them improve their oral and written performance. In this way, instruction for learning EFL pronunciation can be oriented in a more effective way.