A verbo-tonal approach to the acquisition of rhythm in L2 French through gestures

Abstract

This study investigates how Spanish-speaking learners of French can improve rhythm acquisition through the verbo-tonal method (VTM) with pedagogical gestures in oral production tasks. Indeed, French and Spanish differ in the position, domain and function of the primary stress (in French, the primary stress is fixed, oxytone, has a demarcative function and affects the rhythmic group, whereas in Spanish, the lexical stress is free, mostly paroxytone, has a distinctive function and affects the word). The research demonstrates the effectiveness of gestures in helping learners overcome prosodic challenges caused by differences in stress patterns between Spanish and French. Using a two-phase experimental design, the study analyzed acoustic data to compare the rhythmic production of learners with a native French speaker. The corpus chosen was taken from a contemporary French play (Grumberg 2013). The participants were a native French speaker and three Spanish-speaking learners of French. The study was structured in two phases, with a clear distinction in terms of tasks and presentation of the input (Phase I: phonic/listening; Phase II: listening + gestural). Phase I consisted of recording the participants after listening to the whole fragment. After diagnosing the prosodic deviations from the model, Phase II consisted of recording the productions with the facilitating gestural proposal. The acoustic parameter analysed was the mean syllable duration of stressed syllables (primary stress) and unstressed syllables. The results show that for primary stress, the pedagogical gesture effectively attenuated the latency of the typical Spanish trochaic rhythm. The findings indicate that gestural inputs significantly enhance prosodic accuracy compared to auditory input alone, which is a helpful tool to be used in the classroom in order to make students aware of the specific rhythmic characteristics of French.