Teaching Swedish pronunciation in Poland

The present paper aims to describe and discuss the methods used in teaching Swedish pronunciation to students of Scandinavian studies in Poland.

The students begin their studies with no previous knowledge of Swedish. They have ca 300 hours of Swedish instruction throughout the course of their studies (both at BA and at MA level), at least 60 hours with a native speaker. Also, they study pronunciation at a separate course (90 hours over three terms) with practical orientation. Within these classes they begin with study of individual sounds (vowels first, consonants later) and move on to stress, tone and intonation. Also, throughout the remaining Swedish classes pronunciation is very much commented on and corrected by the teacher. Apart from the Swedish course mentioned above, the students take a theoretical course in phonology, focusing on a contrastive Polish-Swedish perspective and theoretical knowledge of pronunciation.

After presenting the courses and methods used, I will present results of a study conducted in the Department, with focus on the students' competence in Swedish tones, which shows that although more advanced students are more confident in their pronunciation on the whole, they tend to make more mistakes with tones than younger students – the main reason being most likely the fact that the younger students were at the time of the study taking a course in pronunciation with focus on tone.

Last, I would like to present results of a survey conducted among the students, the goal of which was to establish the role of the pronunciation in their studies. It shows that for most of the students a native-like pronunciation is something they aspire to and consider a prerequisite of an advanced competence in a foreign language.