Instrução explícita no ensino de pronúncia das consoantes tap alveolar e fricativa velar do português brasileiro para estudantes francófonos do PEC-G

Abstract

The analysis of class recordings made in 2016 with students from the Exchange Program for Undergraduate Students (PEC-G) revealed that one of the difficulties presented by them was the pronunciation of the Brazilian Portuguese rhotics, which is realized with a typical uvular fricative consonant of French. This is a common phenomenon in the learning process of a second language and occurs by replacing the target language phonemes with the mother tongue ones, which often characterizes the foreign accent. The teaching of pronunciation is a way that can help student to perceive the peculiarities of the language that is being studied, and to allow an awareness of what is required to improve. However, pronunciation teaching is often placed in the background or just ignored, especially in the teaching materials, which hinders or delays learning. This work sought to observe the influence of explicit instruction in pronunciation teaching of the alveolar tap and velar fricative from Brazilian Portuguese to francophone students, based on Zimmer (2006), Nishida (2005) and Guedes and Gomes (2010). The data was based on the recordings of two lessons with the 2017 PEC-G students, right before and after an application of pronunciation exercises. Those exercises took place in two stages: the first, around May and June, and the second around August and October 2017; and they consisted in exposing the articulatory processes of phonemes in Brazilian Portuguese and reading skill, initially, saying words and then phrases. The data analysis revealed that there was a meaningful improvement in the students‟ performance with the consonants as well as the capability of recognizing their phonological proper environments.