Enhancing Phonetics Learning in Online Language Courses: A Counterbalanced Study on CLD and SCA Methods for Intermediate CFL Japanese Students

After the outbreak of COVID-19, numerous language courses have embraced online learning. However, the shift of teaching environment also brought many technical and pedagogical challenges. Phonetics learning which requires mutual interaction, teacher’s clarification, and personal feedbacks so students can pronounce correctly is considered one of the most difficult subjects to teach in online context. Therefore, well designed studies are needed to understand the optimized teaching methods to improve student’s performance. This research adopted counterbalanced design to evaluate the effect of contrastive listening and discrimination (CLD) method and sound-character aggregation method (SCA) method in online context. Although both methods are suggested for phonetic learning in offline environment, the result show intermediate Chines-as-foreign-language (CFL) Japanese students had significant improvement after CLD method, but not after SCA method in an online context. However, although students did not have significant improvements after SCA method, its progress is not significantly different from CLD method. We further give some suggestions about teaching Japanese students about Chinese affricates in an online, one-on-one environment.