Testing corrective feedback strategies to improve the mispronunciation of the -ed suffix in the past simple

Abstract

The role of English as a lingua franca nowadays has created a path towards communicative competence, a fact which has effectively helped individuals communicate with one another in a specific setting or context. Nevertheless, non-native speakers of English who use it as a foreign language in the secondary classroom context find that communication cannot take place given that the message conveyed becomes fractured or is blocked by mispronunciation when practising speaking in class. Thus, speaking when using this language can at times be a challenging and demanding task, especially when there is no real focus on it in the Spanish educational system. The present paper analyses one aspect of the speaking skill, namely pronunciation, in a 2nd E.S.O. group in Spain comprised of 30 students, in an attempt to improve their mispronunciation of the -ed suffix when using regular verbs in the past simple tense. Moreover, the purpose of this paper is to try and correct this inappropriate pronunciation through the implementation of a pedagogical treatment or Didactic Unit (DU), which presents several activities spread out in three distinct sessions, as well as the usage of three methods that include the Direct Method, the Audiolingual Method and the Silent Way, and four corrective feedback strategies, namely Repetition, Clarification Request, Elicitation and Paralinguistic Signal.