Examining the activities of teaching Japanese pronunciation in the oral reading class

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to seek better way of teaching Japanese pronunciation by analyzing my teaching activities in the oral reading class conducted in the spring practicum. There are two types of my teaching activities in the oral reading class. The first one is teaching activities in the repeating practice. The second one is teaching activities in giving corrective feedback on learners’ oral errors. After analyzing these two teaching activities, it was found that the reason caused learners couldn’t construct their own pronunciation norms, which led to their repetitive occurrence of the oral errors, is that phonetic knowledge wasn’t provided in the repeating practice. It was also found that, explicit correction, one of the methods of corrective feedback, was mostly used in teaching activities. By studying these two problems in the oral reading class, I have sought the better way of teaching Japanese pronunciation. Firstly, I suggest to teaching related phonetic knowledge to learners to help them foster their own pronunciation norms. Secondly, by giving corrective feedbacks which push learners to modify their errors, to those learners who had constructed their pronunciation norms, could make learners to think the correct answer based on their pronunciation norms.