Assessing Spoken English Performance and Self-Efficacy Beliefs in the Classroom: Some Considerations on the Value of an Interdisciplinary Embodied Methodology for French Learners of English

This paper presents the preliminary results of a four-year applied research project named PICL!. French learners may have difficulty in discriminating a native phonological system, in taking it up as a learning target and in developing oral production skills in the classroom. From the perspective of cognitive psychology, numerous studies show that a learner’s performance and commitment to tasks depend on their self-efficacy beliefs and the perceived usefulness of the tasks. After exposing some salient arguments of the two theoretical paradigms which sustain our interdisciplinary dynamics (corpus phonology and embodied cognition), we present our corpus-based experiment (secondary school, key stages 3 and 4, years 7 to 10) and the step-by-step joint work canvassed with the team of English teachers. The interphonological system of our group of learners is provided, along with a description of the educational modules (in-class and asynchronous on-line videos) which have been elaborated so far. The main finding from our measurements is that, unlike the control group which expresses a lower English self-efficacy belief, the experimental group which benefits from the embodied phonological method does not change their English self-efficacy beliefs over time both for general English and English pronunciation.