Focusing on receptive skills in the teaching of pronunciation in higher education

San Miguel de Tucumán

Jornada; V Jornadas de Actualización para Profesores de Inglés; 2016

CELALEI (Centro de Estudios en Lingüística Aplicada a la Enseñanza del Inglés), dependiente del Departamento de Inglés de la Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, UNT.

In the context of Higher Education, more specifically, when considering the course of studies Profesorado, Traductorado and Licenciatura in the English section at the Faculty of Languages (Córdoba National University), empirical evidence shows that students passing the Introductory Course encounter difficulties in acquiring pronunciation skills during their first year of studies. Taking into consideration that there are two key sides to pronunciation teaching, the teaching of receptive skills and the teaching of productive skills (Kelly, 2000), the Introductory Course focuses on training the former, while in first year there is much more focus on the latter. Continuing the training of reception in first year, as a scaffolding strategy (Wood, Bruner and Ross, 1976), would help not only to narrow down this gap and make this transition more smoothly but also to integrate these two types of skills when acquiring other pronunciation features in the future. Hence, in this study we present sequences of simple pronunciation activities of a receptive nature available in a virtual learning environment (VLE) to be integrated with productive training. Our pedagogic proposal has the aim of offering practice of features at the segmental level and has been designed considering the heterogeneous nature of adult classes in terms of different learning styles and specific needs. Regarding the benefits of drawing upon a virtual platform to implement practice activities in an ESL class, this work finds its grounds on the concepts of blended learning (Barret & Sharma, 2007), which combines traditional learning (face-to-face classes) with web based on-line approaches.