Teaching pronunciation in the high school German classroom: Impact on perceptual, spelling and decoding abilities

In many second language classrooms today, pronunciation teaching is still treated as a side issue. In this study I will show that there are pedagogical and social reasons to focus on comprehensible pronunciation. The data for this thesis come from a comparison of two beginner German high school classes. Both classes were taught in a communicative setting: one was taught phonetics explicitly and the other implicitly. I predicted that the instructed class would have better pronunciation skills than the non-instructed class and that this advantage would affect other language abilities. I was unable to establish a statistically significance difference between these two groups. The data, however, show a trend that indicates that explicit pronunciation instruction may influence second language acquisition beyond speaking and comprehending.