This thesis concerns teaching aspects of connected speech. The theoretical part briefly introduces aspects of connected speech from a phonetic and didactic point of view. It further scrutinizes the relation between teaching aspects of connected speech and the development of decoding skills. The practical part presents research aimed at the effects of explicit instruction and training in selected aspects of connected speech on understanding of authentic speech. The results indicate that twelve 45-minute lessons based on authentic TV series may have had a significant positive influence on the development of the students' listening skills. They further show that the students found the training enjoyable and useful.

This diploma thesis follows up on the bachelor thesis which dealt with the phenomenon of silent letters and which was created by the same author. This bachelor thesis has revealed that Czech learners tend to mispronounce every fifth word containing a silent letter which should be seen as alarming. The diploma thesis therefore tries to find some way how to change this situation. The theoretical part of this thesis focuses on the analysis of various techniques and materials which are concerned with silent letters. In the practical part this materials are adjusted to the needs of the Czech learners in order to create a battery of activities which would cover this area of pronunciation. In the next step these activities will be introduced in English classrooms. In the research we will monitor the progress of the respondents over a larger period of time and assess how effective the created activities are.

Ce projet de recherche vise à étudier la production et la perception de la parole chez les apprenants francophones de l’allemand. Un corpus de parole de 7 heures correspondant à trois tâches (imitation, lecture, description) a été enregistré. Il comprend des germanophones natifs et des apprenants francophones. Nous avons analysée les productions des segments intéressants d'après le cadre du SLM. Une étude de perception en EEG utilisant [h-ʔ], [ʃ-ç] et les voyelles courtes et longues a été réalisée sur des germanophones natifs et des apprenants francophones. Enfin, l'impact de l'enseignement sur l'amélioration des production et perception a été examiné à travers une étude longitudinale. L'étude de production montre que, suivant les tâches, les apprenants produisent le [h] en début de mot sans problème majeur. De même, ils peuvent produire des voyelles de durée contrastive. Cependant, pour les trois tâches, les apprenants ont plus de difficultés pour la production de la qualité vocalique, de [ç] et [ŋ]. Fait notable, la perception ne reflète pas toujours la production. Les apprenants tendent à ne pas percevoir le [h] en début de mot alors que la production de ce segment en répétition est bonne. À l'inverse, les apprenants perçoivent le contraste [ʃ-ç] mais sa production reste difficile. Seulement dans les voyelles courtes et longues, la perception reflète la production.L'étude d'enseignement montre que la conscience linguistique affecte différemment perception et production : une conscience linguistique accrue permet d'affiner la perception de phonèmes à contenu acoustique complexe et la production des phonèmes faciles à produire du point de vue articulatoire. / This research project proposes to investigate the production and perception of German speech in French learners of German. A 7h speech corpus containing three production tasks (imitation, reading, description) produced by German natives and French learners was recorded. Segmental productions of challenging vowels and consonants were analysed according to the SLM. A perception experiment involving [h-ʔ], [ʃ-ç] and short and long vowels using EEG was carried out on German natives and French learners. Finally, the impact of pronunciation teaching on improved speech production and perception was investigated. Undergraduates following a stand-alone pronunciation class were recorded and performed perception tests before and at the end of the course. The production study showed that French learners may produce word-initial [h] faithfully. With regard to short and long vowels, contrasting vowel duration is produced. However, French learners encounter more difficulties with respect to vowel quality. This holds for the production of [ç] and [ŋ]. Interestingly, perception does not always mirror production. The EEG results showed that the perception of word-initial [h] is poor in French learners whereas production accuracy is good. On the contrary, French learners perceive the [ʃ-ç] contrast but its production remains difficult. Only in short and long vowels, perception mirrored production. The teaching study showed that the increased linguistic awareness may affect non-native speech perception and production in different ways: phones that are easy to produce from an articulatory point of view can benefit from teaching. Increased awareness helps to better perceive phones with rich acoustic information.

Cette thèse s’inscrit dans une réflexion sur les apports potentiels de la phonétique expérimentale à la didactique et à l’enseignement de la prononciation. Son objectif est d’examiner les préférences perceptives des locuteurs du finnois, de l’allemand et du français, pour les voyelles antérieures non-arrondies /i e ɛ/ ; et de prolonger cette démarche dans le cadre de l’enseignement de la prononciation du français, en s’interrogeant sur la nécessité de continuer à considérer le contraste existant entre les voyelles moyennes /e/ et /ɛ/. La première partie de ce travail dresse un portrait des trois langues concernées, et introduit les principales hypothèses de processus cognitifs impliqués dans la perception. La deuxième partie de ce travail aborde la perception des voyelles /i e ɛ/, à travers trois tests de perception permettant 1) de définir les prototypes privilégiés par chacune des populations, 2) de mesurer l’effet d’un aimant perceptif spécifique à la langue, et 3) d’évaluer l’importance accordée à l’abaissement de la mandibule pour le choix des exemplaires de chacune des catégories concernées. L’analyse d’un corpus de parole spontanée nous permet enfin d’examiner la robustesse du contraste /e/~/ɛ/, et de mesurer l’intérêt didactique d’enseigner la différenciation et l’acquisition du timbre ouvert et du timbre fermé de ces voyelles en français langue étrangère. La troisième partie de ce travail s’intéresse enfin à la place accordée à la phonétique dans l’enseignement des langues, et offre une revue des principales tendances méthodologiques qui ont contribué à sa diffusion. L’intérêt d’investir différents outils issus de la phonétique expérimentale, du support multimédia, ou de disciplines non-linguistiques, y est discuté. / This work has its place within the context of reflection on the potential input of experimental phonetics to pronunciation teaching. Its aim is to compare the perceptual preferences of native speakers of Finnish, German, and French, for the front non-rounded vowels /i e ɛ/ ; and to extend this approach to French pronunciation teaching, by analyzing the contrast between the middle vowels /e/ and /ɛ/. The first part of this dissertation presents a picture of the phonological systems and phonotactics of the three languages and recalls the main theories about the cognitive processes involved in the perception of phonetic categories. Based on this comparison, the second part examines the perception of the vowels /i e ɛ/. Three studies have been conducted, in order to 1) determine the category’s prototypes for the three populations studied, 2) measure the impact of a language-specific perceptual magnet [Kuhl, 1991], and 3) assess the involvement of mouth opening, to ensure the contrast between the categories in the three languages. The robustness of the contrast /e/~/ε/ through the acoustic analysis of 633 occurrences of /E/ in a spontaneous speech corpus by one French native speaker has been evaluated and the interest to systematically distinguish the sounds of these two vowels in French as a foreign language has been assessed. The diverse conditioning factors, as the trends highlighted in our corpus, are compared to a similar study carried out by Léon and Tennant [1990] on 100 occurrences of /E/ taken from television broadcasts of Bernard Pivot. The third part of this work finally deals with the place granted to phonetics in language teaching and provides a review of the main methodological tendencies which have contributed to its diffusion. The potential of applying different tools resulting from experimental phonetics research, multimedia or non-linguistic disciplines is also discussed.

This study investigates Swedish upper-secondary teachers’ views and reported practices regarding pronunciation instruction in the English-as-a-foreign-language classroom. It adopts a mixed-method design, analysing qualitative data collected from a focus-group interview (N=4) and quantitative data collected from an online survey (N=54).  To investigate the views and reported practices of teachers, the following research questions were posed:  1. What are the views and attitudes of English teachers in the Swedish upper-secondary school regarding pronunciation and pronunciation instruction?  2. How do English teachers in the Swedish upper-secondary school describe their own practices in pronunciation instruction?  Results indicate that teachers generally value comprehensibility as the most important aim of pronunciation instruction. However, a native-like accent still seems to be highly valued, and nativeness norms still seem to affect teachers’ views and practices to some extent. Finally, our findings indicate that teachers spend very little time on pronunciation teaching in general, and they highlight that other aspects of language instruction are more important.

Computer assisted language learning (CALL) comprises a wide range of information technologies that aim to broaden the context of teaching by getting advantages of IT. For example, a few efforts have been put on including a combination of voice and its visual representation for language learning, and some studies are reporting positive outcomes. However, more research is needed in order to assess the impact caused by specific visualization styles such as: highlighting syllables and/or wave of sound. In order to explore this issue, we focused at measuring the potential impact that two distinct visualization styles and its combination can have on teaching children the pronunciation of English as a second language. We built a prototype which was designed to assist students while learning pronunciation of syllables. This system was employing two different real-time interactive visualization styles. One of these visualization styles utilizes audio capturing and processing, using a recent technology development: Web Audio API.We evaluated the effect of our prototype with an experiment with children aged from 9 to 11years old. We followed an experimental approach with a control group and three experimental groups. We tested our hypothesis that states that the use of a combined visualization style can have greater impact at learning pronunciation in comparison with traditional learning approach.Initial descriptive analyses were suggesting promising results for the group that used the combined visualization prototype. However, additional statistical analyses were carried out in order to measure the effect of prototype as accurately as possible within the constraints of our study. Further analyses provided evidence that our combined visualizations prototype has positively affected the learning of pronunciation. Nonetheless, the difference was not big comparing to the system that employed only wave of sound visualization. Ability to perceive visual information differs among individuals. Therefore, further research with different sample division is needed to determine whether is the combination of visualizations that does the effect, or is the wave in itself. Slitting groups based on this characteristic and perform the testing will be considered for the future research.Eventually, we can be confident to continue exploring further the possibility of integrating our proposed combination of two visualization styles in teaching practices of second language learning, due to positive outcomes that our current research outlined. In addition, from a technological perspective, our work is at the forefront of exploring the use of tools such as Web Audio API for CALL.

Ce travail s’intéresse à l’application de la phonétique expérimentale [acoustique et perceptive] à la didactique de la prononciation des langues étrangères. Le propos est illustré par les difficultés d’apprentissage par des japonophones des voyelles du français ; les expériences portent spécifiquement sur les voyelles -u y ø-. Le but est d’élucider les difficultés que présentent ces phones selon que leur statut phonémique et leur réalisation phonétique diffèrent ou non entre la langue maternelle et la langue apprise. Le -u- français diffère phonétiquement de son équivalent phonémique, le -u- japonais. L’étude confirme que le -u- français, phonémiquement « similaire » au -u- japonais, est plus difficile que la voyelle « nouvelle » -y-, qui n'a pas d'équivalent ni phonémique ni phonétique en japonais. La production du -ø-, qui est « nouveau » phonémiquement mais proche du -u- japonais au plan acoustique, semble présenter encore moins de difficulté. La thèse apporte également une réflexion sur la didactique de la prononciation. L’analyse de manuels généralistes de français publiés au Japon suggère que les apprenants et les enseignants sont rarement conscients de la différence de difficultés des -u y ø-. Quelques méthodes d’enseignement de la prononciation – certaines traditionnelles, d’autres innovantes – sont proposées, dans l’idée de favoriser la conscientisation de ces difficultés. Le but de cette thèse est une contribution à l’éclaircissement des processus d’apprentissage de la prononciation des langues étrangères, et à l’amélioration de son apprentissage et de son enseignement. / This dissertation deals with the application of experimental [acoustic and perceptual] phonetics to the teaching of pronunciation. The issue is illustrated by Japanese speakers’ difficulties in learning French vowels in general. Experiments were specifically conducted on the vowels -u y ø-. The objective is to elucidate the case of individual phones depending on whether or not their phonemic status and their phonetic realisation differ in the two languages under study. French -u- differs phonetically from its phonemic counterpart, Japanese -u-. The present study confirms that French -u-, which is phonemically “similar” [to Japanese -u-], turns out to be more difficult than the “new” vowel -y-, which has no phonemic or phonetic counterpart in Japanese. The production of -ø-, which is phonemically “new” but acoustically close to Japanese -u-, seems to present still less difficulty. The dissertation also brings a reflection on t! he teaching of pronunciation. The analysis of general French textbooks published in Japan suggests that learners and teachers are seldom aware of the difference in the difficulties caused by the three vowels -u y ø-. Also, some methods of pronunciation teaching [some traditional, others new] are presented in terms of how they foster learners’ awareness of these difficulties. The goal of this dissertation is to help to shed light on the learning processes of the pronunciation of foreign languages, and to improve its learning and teaching.