Il ruolo del retroterra linguistico-culturale dell’apprendente di lingua straniera nello sviluppo dell’abilità di pronuncia

(Adult) foreign language learners may find the discrimination and reproduction of the sounds of the target language a daunting task. Their linguistic background constrains their receptive-productive pronunciation skills. Learners thus need practical suggestions on how to process and utter sounds, which takes their linguistic experience into consideration. An approach of this kind was successfully used for four years with intermediate-level students of English in the former Faculty of Education, and was later also implemented in the former Faculty of Letters. Sensitizing learners to new, finer phonetic-phonemic distinctions involves, among other things: describing sounds in a way that makes sense to the learner (later to be re-fined; e.g. «speaking with a lisp» > «producing interdental fricatives»); setting short-term pronunciation standards seen by learners as achievable goals (e.g. «to pronounce /I/, open your mouth as if to say /e/ but try to say /i/ without moving your jaw»); identifying comparable phenomena in the target language and the languages familiar to the learner (e.g. vowel reduction in unstressed syllables: /æ/tom/ – /ə/tomic; b/ε/llo – b/e/llissimo); resorting to shared cultural knowledge («to produce dark l’s, imitate Raffaella Carrà saying 'È molto bello'»); raising learners’ awareness of their ability to produce target sounds in native-like contexts (e.g. «to produce a syllable-final velar nasal, utter the first syllable in tango, holding the –n- for a bit»). Thus what learners already know (how to do) can serve as the scaffolding from which they can explore new aspects of the target language and enrich their skills in due course.