Attention, awareness, and accents in L2 French

Effects of benchmarking and peer‐assessment on French learners' self‐assessments of accentedness, comprehensibility, and fluency

“…However, training in self‐reflection and self‐assessment appears to lead to more convergence between learners' self‐assessments and teachers' evaluations (Babaii et al, 2016; Chen, 2008; see also Meritan & Mroz, 2019). Similarly, repeated self‐assessment seems to impact learners' language performance positively, such that those who self‐assess their speech over time improve in various dimensions of speech, including fluency, pronunciation, and connected speech processes (de Saint Léger 2009; Kissling and O'Donnell 2015), likely through increased awareness of these dimensions (for empirical work linking L2 learners' pronunciation development to measures of self‐reflection and awareness, see Meritan, 2020; Meritan & Mroz, 2019; Sturm, 2013, 2019).…”

Impact of self‐reflection and awareness‐raising on novice French learners’ pronunciation

“…They suggested that “the relationship between awareness and instruction is reciprocal and self‐reinforcing”: as metacognition develops, learning is reinforced, which in turn furthers the development of metacognition (p. 91). Indeed, research has shown that developing phonological awareness is key to fostering different facets of pronunciation, including comprehensibility, perception, intonation, fluency, self‐repairs, and accuracy (Derwing, ; Kennedy & Blanchet, ; Kennedy et al, ; Kennedy & Trofimovich, ; Lee, Jang, & Plonsky, ; Ramírez Verdugo, ; Sturm, ; Venkatagiri & Levis, ; Wrembel, , ). Being phonologically aware “entails [having] not only metalinguistic understanding of L2 phonology, but also ‘implicit knowledge about the phonological system of the target language and its structural properties at the segmental, suprasegmental, and phonotactic levels’” (Mora, Rochdi, & Kivisö‐de Souza, , p. 58, as cited in Derwing, , pp.…”