TESOL Quarterly invites commentary on current trends or practices in the TESOL profession. It also welcomes responses or rebuttals to any articles or remarks published here in the Forum or elsewhere in the Quarterly.
This paper discusses the findings of an empirical study that explores the relationship between study-abroad experiences, learner identity, and pronunciation. We argue that the role of pronunciation as a personal domain of meaning-making warrants more attention than it has hitherto received. To this end, we investigate the narratives of Canadian learners, studying abroad in Germany, in relation to discourses of language learning, culture, and identity, using a Critical Discourse Analysis approach. Our data, which we gained from semi-structured interviews and e-journals, shows that learners' perceptions of pronunciation are closely linked to their views of the native-speaker ideal, impacting their self-constructions and interpretations of learning experience. In conclusion, we argue for a more differentiated understanding of pronunciation and its implications for language teaching and study abroad.
Zusammenfassung
In diesem Beitrag wird aus einem laufenden Forschungsprojekt berichtet, das sich der Erkundung subjektiver Perspektiven von Lehrenden im DaF-Unterricht an einer kanadischen Universität widmet. Ziel ist, Unterrichtssituationen nicht nur im Detail zu beschreiben, sondern auch die Innensicht von Lehrenden möglichst genau zu erfassen und im Rahmen des Verständnisses von Unterrichtssequenzen systematisch zu berücksichtigen. Zu diesem Zweck wurde ein Mehrmethodendesign entwickelt, das sowohl Videomitschnitte von Unterricht als auch Fragebogenerhebungen und Interviews mit Lehrenden umfasst. Bei der Auswertung der Daten erwiesen sich die Begriffe Grammatik und Macht als zentrale Bezugskonzepte, wenn es um die Organisation und Reflexion von DaF-Unterricht geht.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.