Disentangling French tongues in a German classroom
Résumé
The pronunciation of a foreign language is not an intuitive task to accomplish. It needs correct input (Flege, 2009), training and feedback (Kartushina et al. 2015). Becoming aware of the differences in pronunciation that exist between a learners’ mother tongue (L1) and a foreign language (L2) can help learners to improve their pronunciation in the L2 (Wrembel, 2007).
In the following, we present the Progression and Feedback French Learners Audio Corpus of German Speech (ProFee-FLACGS) created between September and December 2015 with a volume of approximately 10h of speech. Participants are 75 first grade French students majoring in German. All participants took an obligatory class in German pronunciation theory. Although not all participants grew up in a monolingual household, they were all French dominant. The 30 participants were split in two groups: while 15 participants got a classic training, 15 participants got training and some visual input in form of spectrograms. An expected outcome of this experimental setting is a better phonological awareness in the group that got visual input and by this means a quicker or better improvement in German pronunciation. Participants had four obligatory oral assignments to perform across the semester. They recorded themselves and send an audio-file of their production to the teacher.
French learners are famous for their /h/ onset omissions in foreign languages like English or German (Kamiyama et al., 2011; Zimmerer & Trouvain, 2015). Omitting /h/ onsets is not the only difficulty French learners of German meet, sometimes they also produce /h/ onsets instead of a glottal stop. For instance in one of the reading tasks, the word group keine Ahnung haben which should be pronounced /kaɪ̯ nəʔaːnuŋhabən/ was uttered as followed by some of the participants: [kaɪ̯nəhaːnuŋhabən] or [kaɪ̯nəhaːnuŋʔabən]. A human expert checks h-initial and V-initial words The Progression and Feedback corpus shows that both the omission of /h/ onsets as well as the replacement of /ʔ/ onsets by /h/ onsets improve over time in both experimental groups. In the final presentation, it will be shown to what extend.