Magdalena Wrembel

WORKSHOP - Soczewka 2003

Metacompetence and 'repair' - in pursuit of an effective approach to the acquisition of second language phonology. Practical ideas for classroom application.

The workshop aims at investigating two approaches towards successful acquisition of second language phonology; metacompetence and the so-called 'repair' strategy. The former is based on the development of the learner's phonological knowledge and metalinguistic awareness through theoretical instruction. The latter, on the other hand, relies on the learner's perception of L2 speech, leading from an unfamiliar intention to a familiar production repaired by suppression of an assumed L2 process, based on the claim that the assumed process functions "somewhere" in the learner's phonology as advocated by Dziubalska-Kołaczyk 2002 [1].

It is hoped that the workshop will provide further insights into the underlying principles and practical classroom applications of these two different approaches to pronunciation instruction.

The presenters plan to:

1) Provide working definitions of metacompetence and 'repair'.

2) Briefly discuss the role of consciousness in learning second language pronunciation.

3) Present selected features of English phonology particularly troublesome for Polish learners (based on contrastive analysis), including:
- the segmentals (selected consonants or consonantal clusters),
- aspects of connected speech,
- voice quality setting.

4) Propose different solutions for troubleshooting highlighted problem areas by resorting to:
a) metalinguistic knowledge
b) 'repair' strategy

Workshop participants will be divided into two groups and encouraged to come up with ideas for specific teaching techniques and procedures in line with one of the respective approaches.

5) Present further examples of practical applications of the two approaches (e.g. a variety of multi-modal techniques to enhance theoretical instruction).

6) Open the issue of the effectiveness of the respective methods up for discussion.