Teacher Training and Its Role in Teaching German Pronunciation and Speaking Skills
Keywords:
Teacher training, pronunciation training, word stress, sentence stress, intonation, speaking skills, German languageAbstract
Purpose: The present study aimed to examine the role of specialized teacher training in improving German instructors’ pronunciation and speaking performance and to describe the oral performance of A1 learners taught by instructors with the strongest final performance.
Methodology: This applied descriptive-comparative study was conducted in two consecutive stages. In the first stage, five German-language instructors, coded L1 to L5, participated in a four-week specialized teacher-training course totaling 24 hours. Their oral performance was assessed before and after the training using a five-point scale covering pronunciation accuracy, word stress, sentence stress, intonation, rhythm, and speech clarity. The two instructors with the strongest final performance were then selected to teach two groups of 15 A1 learners each. A total of 30 learners aged 19–28 years with no previous experience learning German participated in the second stage. At the end of instruction, learners’ oral performance was evaluated across the same major pronunciation and speaking dimensions, and the data were analyzed descriptively.
Findings: The instructors’ mean performance score decreased from 2.80 at pretest to 1.95 at posttest, indicating overall improvement. L1 and L2 achieved the strongest final scores of 1.50 and 1.75, respectively. The overall speaking-performance mean was 1.83 ± 0.35 in the group taught by L1 and 1.97 ± 0.38 in the group taught by L2. Across all learners, the strongest performance was observed in speech clarity with a mean of 1.73, followed by pronunciation accuracy at 1.80 and word stress at 1.87, whereas intonation showed the weakest performance with a mean of 2.07.
Conclusion: Specialized teacher training was associated with improved oral performance among German instructors, while learners taught by the selected instructors demonstrated favorable final performance across major pronunciation and speaking dimensions. Systematic integration of phonetics, suprasegmental features, and corrective-feedback strategies into German teacher-training programs may therefore support higher-quality pronunciation and speaking instruction.
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