purpose of this paper is, first, to analyze the data from a beta-pilot test of the instruments created by triangulating information gathered from item analysis on the two instruments created (the sentences to record and the self-evaluations) to check the quality of the items. This paper will also assess whether the use of self-evaluations by college-level learners of French enrolled in a phonetics course, will improve their pronunciation over the course of a semester. It will also evaluate whether, and to what extent self-evaluations items completed by the learners are reliable and valid. The students have been recruited from the French phonetics course, and then divided into a treatment and control group. They submitted recordings of text and sentences provided by the researcher before and after a specific phonetic lesson and submitted self-evaluations before and after completing the recordings (treatment group only).
Self-evaluations in the acquisition of pronunciation of French as an L2
Introduction
Since the introduction in the 1970s of the Communicative Language Teaching Method (CLTM), teaching and learning pronunciation has been unpopular. Before the 1970s, the audio-lingual methods focused intensely on pronunciation, it then fell into disuse. According to Thomson & Derwing (2014), “pronunciation fell out of vogue” (p.9). Most researchers came to ignore pronunciation learning and teaching. However, in the past decade pronunciation instruction has progressively become significant again (Thomson & Derwing, 2014). Researchers have shown that pronunciation instruction can be beneficial to learners of foreign languages (Birdsong, 2007; Couper, 2006; Derwing & Munro, 2015; Grant, 2015; Harding, 2013; Lee, Jang, & Plonsky, 2014; Levis, 2005; Saito, 2011). Pronunciation teaching is now moving towards comprehensibility and intelligibility rather than native-likeness, as the latter is near unattainable (Birdsong, 2007). There is, though, one problem when it comes to teaching pronunciation: the lack of efficient, valid, and reliable methods to assess learners’ pronunciation, which Saito (2011) argues, is one key element to the success of pronunciation teaching. Finding valid and reliable methods to assess students\’ pronunciation is key to improving pronunciation instruction and acquisition.
One potentially useful method to assess learners’ pronunciation is self-assessment, since, “if students can appraise their own performance accurately [emphasis added] enough, they will be able to make teachers aware of their individual learning needs” (Blanche & Merino, 1989, p.313). Much of research on self-assessment has been conducted on reliability and validity (Dlaska, 2008), and Fraser (2000) warned about the need for a reliable methodology behind self-assessment in teaching pronunciation. The impact of such a method on learners’ pronunciation, whether negativ
