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The Evolution of Pronunciation Teaching and Research: 25 years of intelligibility, comprehensibility, and accentedness
Edited by John M. Levis, Tracey M. Derwing and Murray J. Munro
[Benjamins Current Topics 121] 2022
► pp. 103–124

Long-term effects of intensive instruction on fluency, comprehensibility and accentedness

| Sam Houston State University
| Université TÉLUQ
| Concordia University

We assessed the long-term effects of intensive instruction on different aspects of L2 oral production. Adopting the tridimensional model of oral production (Munro & Derwing, 1995a), we compared high school learners who had received intensive ESL instruction (N = 42) with non-intensive learners (N = 39) on perceptual measures of L2 fluency, comprehensibility, and accentedness 4 years after a 5-month intensive instruction period. After controlling for academic ability and L2 proficiency, listeners’ ratings of fluency and comprehensibility were significantly higher for the IG; however, there was no specific group advantage for accentedness, suggesting both groups exhibited similar L2 accents. This study provides new empirical evidence that the oral fluency and comprehensibility benefits of an intensive experience may be long-lasting, even when learners’ subsequent classroom exposure to the language is much more limited.

Keywords: long-term effects, intensive instruction, second language, oral fluency, fluency, comprehensibility, accentedness, development of oral competence, children
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1Intensive instruction
    • 1.2Long-term effects of intensive instruction
  • 2.Method
    • 2.1Participants and study context
    • 2.2Procedure
    • 2.3Background questionnaire (L2 contact)
    • 2.4Speech elicitation task
    • 2.5Speech sample preparation
    • 2.6Raters
    • 2.7Rating task
  • 3.Results
    • 3.1Interrater reliability
    • 3.2Fluency, comprehensibility and accentedness scores
    • 3.3Utterance fluency measures
  • 4.Discussion
    • 4.1Fluency
    • 4.2Comprehensibility
    • 4.3Accentedness
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Note
  • References
Published online: 1 June 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/bct.121.06fre
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