The National Center on Universal Design for Learning website

Sample Solution

The study took place at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. L2 students in a French phonetics course were recruited to participate in the project via an in-class introduction and follow-up emails. The tasks were integrated into the structure of the French phonetics course, and all students in the course were expected to complete these tasks. The instructor of the course was not a member of the research team. The Fall 2016 French phonetics course had two sections, one section was the control group (G1) while the other the treatment group (G2). The groups were assigned randomly to one or the other section. Recruitment took place at the beginning of a class period after permission had been granted by the instructor. The researcher then explained the goals of the study and distributed individual sign-up sheet to preserve the anonymity of the participants. Any student who wished to participate was welcome. The researcher hoped to recruit at least 15 participants in each section of the French phonetics course to meet the requirement for representativeness, but due to lack of enrollment, there were only 7 participants per group. The qualitative data from the participants provided rich enough data to obtain a credible picture and ensure saturation. Thus the requirements for the representativeness/saturation trade-off was met. Both groups received the same instruction in French phonetics and pronunciation. The phonetics course was held every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for fifty minutes. Fridays were dedicated to lab work, while Mondays and Wednesdays were lectures. At the University of Illinois, French pronunciation is taught following an explicit methodology. Each phonological feature is explained in detail according to the manner of pronunciation: tongue position, jaw position, lips, etc. Data Collection