TY - JOUR

T1 - Teaching Practical Phonology On-line: Pros and Cons

AU - Павловская, Ирина Юрьевна

N1 - Павловская И.Ю. Преподавание практической фонетики онлайн: плюсы и минусы // Focus on Language Education and Research. - 2023. - Т. 4. - №1. - C. 20-34.

PY - 2023

Y1 - 2023

N2 - In our digital era the necessity of developing distance (on-line) learningcourses both in Russia and in the whole world is not viewed any longer as achallenge but rather as an issue of practicality. Both state budgeted educationalinstitutions and private sector companies are involved in producing relevantprograms to answer the demand in the market. Pronunciation is the area whichstays beyond the main focus of material writers’ attention. Although the speaker’s pronunciation culture is the first signal that influences the listener’s perception of the utterance itself and of the speaker’s personality, consciously or subconsciously. In the latest projects of the Council of Europe which provide detailed descriptors for assessing phonological skills, general phonological control is measured according to the intelligibility, that is how much effort interlocutor has to make to understand the speaker. The interlocutor should not necessarily be a native speaker. This ruins the idea of native pronunciation and traditional phonetic standards. The role of the teacher becomes more complicated, because he/she has to identify the level of intelligibility of a student according to his/her inner criteria. In this respect digital technologies can save the situation providing speech models with acceptable range of variability. In the article the possibilities of teaching and learning the phonology of foreign languages distantly are discussed. The following methodological factors are considered: focus groups, content, format, technologies, methods and techniques of training, duration of training sessions. Electronic resources for teaching phonetic perception and production of the English Language at both segmental and supersegmental levels are presented. Each resource’s characteristics are discussed in a short review. The preferable options are identified. This material might be useful for English teachers planning distance classes with remedial type of phonetic training in various educational contexts.

AB - In our digital era the necessity of developing distance (on-line) learningcourses both in Russia and in the whole world is not viewed any longer as achallenge but rather as an issue of practicality. Both state budgeted educationalinstitutions and private sector companies are involved in producing relevantprograms to answer the demand in the market. Pronunciation is the area whichstays beyond the main focus of material writers’ attention. Although the speaker’s pronunciation culture is the first signal that influences the listener’s perception of the utterance itself and of the speaker’s personality, consciously or subconsciously. In the latest projects of the Council of Europe which provide detailed descriptors for assessing phonological skills, general phonological control is measured according to the intelligibility, that is how much effort interlocutor has to make to understand the speaker. The interlocutor should not necessarily be a native speaker. This ruins the idea of native pronunciation and traditional phonetic standards. The role of the teacher becomes more complicated, because he/she has to identify the level of intelligibility of a student according to his/her inner criteria. In this respect digital technologies can save the situation providing speech models with acceptable range of variability. In the article the possibilities of teaching and learning the phonology of foreign languages distantly are discussed. The following methodological factors are considered: focus groups, content, format, technologies, methods and techniques of training, duration of training sessions. Electronic resources for teaching phonetic perception and production of the English Language at both segmental and supersegmental levels are presented. Each resource’s characteristics are discussed in a short review. The preferable options are identified. This material might be useful for English teachers planning distance classes with remedial type of phonetic training in various educational contexts.

KW - culture of speaking, distance learning, pronunciation, phonology, teaching methodology, internet resources, foreign languages, phonological control, focus group, speech perception, speech production.

M3 - Article

VL - 4

SP - 20

EP - 34

JO - Focus on Language Education and Research

JF - Focus on Language Education and Research

SN - 2686-7516

IS - 1

ER -