The present study aims at determining whether instruction in the form of explicit phonetic training and of implicit exposure to native input impacted Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) students’ phonological awareness of the occurrence of Englishschwain unstressed syllables of content words (bacon). Four intact CLIL groups were administered a perception task immediately before and after an intervention period of one month in which two groups underwent explicit instruction on the incidence of reduced vowels versus full vowels in English disyllabic words while another group was exposed to native input in their CLIL sessions. A fourth CLIL group with neither explicit intervention nor native teacher input served as control group. All four groups tended to judge bothschwasand full vowels as correct in the pre-test, indicating that they were not knowledgeable of the general pattern of vowel reduction occurrence in unstressed syllables in English prior to intervention. In the post-test, the three experimental groups significantly improved their ability to identify full vowels as incorrect, the groups receiving explicit instruction exhibiting higher gains than the group which was implicitly exposed to native input.
Phonetic training has been found to expedite aural and oral abilities in the L2. While considerable research has
been conducted on the effects of perception training on production and of production training on perception, fewer studies have
addressed them as separate training regimes in the same experimental setting outside laboratory conditions. This paper examined
the effects of two training procedures (one based on production tasks and one based on perception tasks) on the production of
English lexical schwa by young Spanish learners in their intact EFL classrooms. Both trained groups exhibited
significant gains in the post-test and a slight advantage of the production-based trained group was observed. Learners’ orosensory
awareness, self-perception, and self-feedback were actions included in this protocol which may have contributed to such advantage.
Our results demonstrate that guided pronunciation training protocols can be successful in the classroom with young learners to
boost production skills.
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