How task-based pronunciation teaching could improve native Italian speakers' pronunciation of English sounds.

Abstract

Pronunciation teaching is considered an important aspect of leaming any new language, with the intended goal of achieving comprehensibility and intelligibility being the primary focus. By drawing from the framework and principles of tasked-based language teaching (TBLT) and tasked-based pronunciation teaching (TBPT), this study aimed to answer two questions; can three lessons of TBPT improve Italian speaker's pronunciation of English to some degree, and would the TBPT approach help Italian learners of English better pronounce the sounds: /0/, /0/, /h/, /sn/, /sl/ and minimal pairs /1/ and /i:/. At its heart, the principles of the TBLT method serves to focus on using real-life meaningful tasks to assist learners to use the target language to achieve a specific goal (Ellis, 1996), and, similarly, the principles of the TBPT method utilise meaningful communicative tasks to help improve learners pronunciation, as well as help learners use pronunciation effectively in real-life communication situations (Gordon, 2021). Considering these principles, quantitative research was conducted in an educational context at a school in San Piero e Scarperia, Tuscany which consisted of native speaking Italian participants, who received three treatments of the TBPT method aimed at improving pronunciation. By following a scoring rubric, both the experimental and control groups received a word list and text targeting the sounds /0/, //, /h/, /sm/, /sn/, /sl/ and minimal pairs of /z/ and /i:/, which served as a pre-and post-test to determine how learners pronounced the sounds before and after receiving the treatment of the TBPT method. The immediate results of the research demonstrated that the learners of the experimental group who received treatment of the TBPT method were able to pronounce certain words in the post-test better, compared to those in the control group. These results indicate that TBPT could in fact be used to positively influence Italian speaker's pronunciation of English to some degree. Furthermore, the results continued to show that almost all of the sounds (0/, /0/, /h/, /sn/, /sl/ and minimal pairs /1/ and /1:/) of English that were taught through the TBPT method, were enhanced or improved, and this was evident in the data that was collected in the pre-test and the post-test scenarios.