Special Section on Pedagogical Decisions for Prosody Teaching
Crash modules to help Persians speak more intelligible and comprehensible English, emphasizing either production or
perception of either sounds or melodies
Yenkimaleki and van Heuven (2021) studied the effects of teaching
either segmental or suprasegmental (prosodic) aspects of English, in combination with either perception or production-focused
practice (four combinations in all) on the speech intelligibility and comprehensibility of Persian L1 learners of English as a
foreign language. Generally, production-focused exercises were more effective but there was no overall effect of teaching
segmentals versus prosody. However, the specific combination of emphasis on prosody and production-oriented exercises was most
beneficial. We summarize the results of the study and present, more systematically and in more detail than in the original
article, the materials and teaching methods used.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.The study
- 3.Instruction modules
- 3.1Explaining and training segmental features
- a.Description and analysis
- b.Listening discrimination
- c.Monitored practice
- d.Guided practice
- e.Communicative practice
- 3.2Explaining and training prosodic features
- a.Awareness
- b.Shadowing
- c.Stress
- d.Contextualization
- e.Meaningful tasks
- f.Realistic tasks
- 4.Discussion
- 5.Conclusion
-
References