New Approach to Teaching Japanese Pronunciation in the Digital Era - Challenges and Practices

Pronunciation has been a black hole in the L2 Japanese classroom on account of a lack of class time, teacher\u2019s confidence, and consciousness of the need to teach pronunciation, among other reasons. The absence of pronunciation instruction is reported to result in fossilized pronunciation errors, communication problems, and learner frustration. With an intention of making a contribution to improve such circumstances, this paper aims at three goals. First, it discusses the importance, necessity, and e ectiveness of teaching prosodic aspects of Japanese pronunciation from an early stage in acquisition. Second, it shows that Japanese prosody is challenging because of its typological rareness, regardless of the L1 backgrounds of learners. Third and finally, it introduces a new approach to teaching L2 pronunciation with the goal of developing L2 comprehensibility by focusing on essential prosodic features, which is followed by discussions on key issues concerning how to implement the new approach both inside and outside the classroom in the digital era

Prosodic Transfer: An Acoustic Study of L2 English vs. L2 Japanese

The book presents an extended investigation of how first language (L1) prosodic characteristics affect second language (L2) prosodic patterns in the production of the adult L2 speaker: i.e., prosodic transfer. Two L2 types are examined experimentally: L2 English produced by L1 Japanese speakers, and L2 Japanese produced by L1 English speakers. This comparison is interesting, since Japanese and English are typologically very different in terms of their prosodic properties: e.g., English has stress accent, while Japanese has pitch accent; Japanese has a phonemic length contrast, while English does not; English is a stress-timed language, while Japanese is a mora-timed language. The results of a series of acoustic experiments show the complex effects of L1 on L2 speech development at multiple speech levels. The implications of the results presented in the book should be of interest to researchers in phonetics, phonology and L2 language acquisition as well as language teachers