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Article published In:
Dutch Journal of Applied Linguistics
Vol. 8:2 (2019) ► pp.291–309

Effects of prosody awareness training on the intelligibility of Iranian interpreter trainees in English

| Free University Amsterdam | University of Nahavand
| University of Pannonia | Leiden University
The present study investigates the effect of prosodic feature awareness training on the intelligibility of speech produced by Iranian interpreter trainees. Two groups of student interpreters were formed. All were native speakers of Farsi who studied English translation and interpreting at the BA level. Participants took a pretest of speaking skills before starting the program so that their speech intelligibility level was rated. The control group listened to authentic audio tracks in English and discussed their contents, watched authentic English movies, discussed issues in the movies in pairs in the classroom. The experimental group spent part of the time on theoretical explanation of, and practical exercises with, English prosody. Students then took a posttest in speaking skills so that the effect of treat-​ment on the intelligibility of their speech could be assessed. The results show that the prosody awareness training significantly improved the students’ speech intelligibility.
Keywords: prosody, speech intelligibility, awareness training, interpreter trainees, curriculum design
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Methodology
    • 2.1Participants
    • 2.2Procedure
  • 3.Results
  • 4.Conclusion and discussion
  • Note
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 1 October 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/dujal.17023.yen
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