Prosody encodes meanings (Levis & Wichmann, 2015) and significantly influences L2 English speakers' intelligibility and comprehensibility (Anderson-Hsieh, Johnson, & Koehler, 1992; Derwing, Munro, & Wiebe, 1998). However, L2 English speakers are deficient in using English prosody to realize pragmatic functions (Pickering, 2001; Wennerstrom, 1998), hindering effective communication between L1 English speakers and L2 English speakers. Furthermore, due to the complex and dynamic nature of prosody, English prosody teaching is particularly challenging for teachers.
Reed and Michaud (2015) argue that metalinguistic awareness is an essential factor in effective prosody teaching. However, research studies providing empirical support for their claim are lacking. Furthermore, in recent years, an increasing number of research studies discovered similarities between Mandarin and English prosodic features and functions (Chen & Gussenhoven, 2008; Ouyang & Kaiser, 2015), suggesting the possibility to use crosslinguistic transfer to facilitate the teaching of English prosody. However, research studies investigating the efficacy of crosslinguistic based prosody pedagogy are also lacking.
This study investigates the role of imitation, metalinguistic awareness, and L1 prosody in English prosody teaching by examining the efficacy of three prosody teaching methods: imitation-based prosody teaching (IT), monolingual metalinguistic awareness- based prosody teaching (mono-MAT) and crosslinguistic metalinguistic awareness-based prosody teaching (cross-MAT). 48 participants were randomized into four groups and received different kinds of intervention: (1) IT, (2) mono-MAT, (3) cross-MAT and (4) interview (control group). Participants' use of English prosody was elicited in a pretest, an immediate posttest, and a two-week delayed posttest by means of a read-aloud task and a picture narrative task eliciting participants' spontaneous speech.
Participants' use of sentence stress was rated by six native English speakers based on 9-point Likert scales. The stressed constituents in participants' read-aloud speech were further analyzed regarding average pitch level, pitch range, duration, and intensity. Linear mixed-effects analysis was conducted to compare participants' use of sentence stress across groups and tests. The results suggest that metalinguistic awareness plays a critical role in prosody learning. The results also suggest the advantage of crosslinguistic prosody teaching.
This study expands the breadth of pronunciation teaching by exploring the prosodic similarities across languages. This study increases the depth of pronunciation teaching by encouraging a paradigm shift from imitating the prosodic patterns to understanding the connection between the linguistic patterns and the pragmatic functions of prosodic features.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bu.edu/oai:open.bu.edu:2144/30689 |
| Date | 30 June 2018 |
| Creators | Liu, Di |
| Contributors | Reed, Marnie |
| Source Sets | Boston University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis/Dissertation |
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