Abstract
Pronunciation is defined as the production of sound and pronunciation teaching would thus seem, as is actually the case in many handbooks, to be concerned with how to articulate sounds providing information on the organs of speech, the nature of speech sounds and the correct production of sounds. Yet, telling learners how to articulate the sounds of a foreign language, either through giving examples or cognitively orientated activities, often does not of itself lead to the correct pronunciation of these sounds.
Some learners seem to be literally deaf to all the teacher s efforts, and in a sense they are. They are deaf to the sounds or a foreign language, unable to recognize unfamiliar sounds and attribute meaning to them because they have learned to disregard acoustic information that they consider irrelevant for communication.
The listening habits of their native language have conditioned their perception and act as a kind of acoustic filter in order to help people protect themselves from the flood of sensory input that needs to be selected and categorized before it can be processed. Children develop strategies for selective hearing from an early age onwards and the range of frequencies that they can actively perceive becomes narrower as they grow older.
Although the human ear is able to perceive a wide spectrum of frequencies (from about 16 to 16,000 or sometimes even 20,000 Hertz), we consciously hear only the sounds we use for communicative purposes and filter out irrelevant background information. Adult learners in particular tend to be restricted in the perception of sounds by acquired listening habits and as a consequence, are often unable to discriminate the sounds of a foreign language correctly.
In the following pages we would like to present the initial results of a project that aims at evaluating the efficiency of a method that claims to help learners unlearn these selection processes. This innovative approach to language teaching focusses on the influence of concentrated listening as a means to improving pronunciation and accelerating language learning in general by using a special form of ear training to achieve a better perception of sounds.
It is based on the principles of the audiophonology theory of Alfred Tomatis but uses a somewhat modified approach attempting to adapt the method to a university context. This paper presents the initial results from students use of pre-filtered language material in the language laboratory.