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Article published In:
Journal of Second Language Pronunciation
Vol. 9:3 (2023) ► pp.289–301
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

| Leiden University
| Bu-Ali Sina University

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.

Keywords: Crash modules, intelligible speech, comprehensible speech, prosody teaching
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The study
    • 2.1Method
    • 2.2Results
  • 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
Published online: 29 January 2024
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/jslp.23053.van
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