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Paper short abstract:

This research deals with education specializing in Japanese pronunciation at the university in France. We focus on the changes in pronunciation of learners due to feedbacks. Learners could not only get noticed but also actually change pronunciation by using resources and feedbacks.

Paper long abstract:

This research is a longitudinal practice which we conducted at the university in France, dealing with education specializing in Japanese pronunciation. From the viewpoint of establishing communication, easy-to-understand pronunciation is important, and pronunciation education is in demand. However, there are few practical examples of it. This research aims to contribute to the development of it by clarifying the learning of learners and teachers and the practice issues longitudinally.

In this presentation, we focus on the changes in pronunciation of learners due to pronunciation feedback (FB), which has been developed in the second year of practice. We gave a text and verbal FB to the learners who recorded their voices. It was focused on the special beats and prosody, which were the teaching items in our lesson.

All 41 learners who re-submitted after receiving the FB had some improvements in pronunciation compared to before the FB. According to our listening judgment, the pronunciation of the 3 learners changed significantly at the following 4 points.

1. The generation of special beats has been improved.

2. The generation of accent type has been improved.

3. The rise of the sound at the end of the phrase has been reduced.

4. Stagnation and pauses in words and sentences has been reduced.

Looking at the examples above, it was found that there were changes in words other than the words pointed out by the FB, and it was found that the learners perceived their pronunciation metaphorically based on the FB and changed it.

Therefore, it became clear that learners could not only get noticed but also actually change pronunciation by using resources and FB in a complementary manner. Thus, we can suggest that pronunciation FB is effective in pronunciation education and promotes learners' meta-learning.