In video veritas: Short-Videos als authentische Ausspracheübungen
In Video Veritas: Short Videos as Authentic Pronunciation Exercises)

Summary/Abstract: In the article, the author discusses phonetic teaching using audiovisual materials. Authentic short videos offer effective opportunities for teaching phonetics in German as a foreign language (DaF). They are appealing, encourage repetition, and promote fluency and situational awareness. They are easily accessible, bring contemporary spoken language into the classroom, and can be used in a variety of ways as context-based pronunciation exercises. Through imitation, they promote the intonational and articulatory progression of learners. Authentic materials are important for learning natural language use and developing strategies for reception and production. They contain typical features of everyday language use, such as colloquial elisions, suprasegmental expressiveness, foreign or pluricentric accents, stylistic hybridity, facial expressions, and gestures. The use of digital media in the classroom is therefore useful, but requires an adapted didactic approach. Two stand-up comedians, Alain Frei and Sebastian Lehmann, serve as motivating model speakers with dialect-free pronunciation in their live performances recorded on video. During repetition exercises, students are confronted with what is known as speech fluency, which means that they form a concrete and conscious idea of the speech continuum with all its suprasegmental aspects: speed, melody modulation, and emotionality. Subtitles support the multimodal approach in which speaking is combined with reading. Subsequently, one can also concentrate on the sound-letter correspondence. The statement In video veritas – meaning “the truth is in the video” – was placed at the beginning of this paper. It is intended to convey the message that videos, as situation-anchored and multi-perspective works of art, best correspond to what we encounter as truth, in our case, with a focus on linguistic-cultural reality and natural language use.

• Details
• Contents