Examining the Effects of Explicit Pronunciation Instruction on the Development of L2 Pronunciation

Abstract

The current study compares the effects of two types of pronunciation instruction (segmental- and suprasegmental-based) on the development of second-year Chinese undergraduate students’ English pronunciation as against a group with no specific pronunciation (NSP) instruction. The participants were 90 university-level students in the Chinese mainland, from three intact classes. One class was taught with a segmental focus (N = 30) and the second with a suprasegmental focus (N = 31), while the third received NSP instruction (N = 29). The results showed that after an 18-week period of instruction, both the segmental and suprasegmental groups made statistically significant progress in pronunciation, as measured by comprehensibility on a sentence-reading task; however, only the suprasegmental group made statistically significant progress in comprehensibility at the spontaneous level, and it was also the only group that maintained these spontaneous gains on the delayed posttest. The positive effects of explicit pronunciation instruction in general and of suprasegmental instruction in particular account for the findings.

Technology Review: The Perfect Accent App

“…While Speechace was developed to improve the pronunciation and fluency of L2 learners, there is little attention to suprasegmental features. The role of suprasegmental features in improving L2 pronunciation is recognized in L2 speech research (Zhang & Yuan, 2020), and thus Speechace modules should include suprasegmentals. Another point is pertinent to the focus on accentedness rather than intelligibility.…”

Automatic speech recognition and text-to-speech technologies for L2 pronunciation improvement

“…This section aims to consider recent claims on the discussion of pronunciation teaching, defending it as a means to help L2 learners overcome difficulties in their pronunciation skills that otherwise could affect overall communication in the target language. Although there is also a great deal of current discussion concerning which pronunciation feature yields more significant pronunciation gains, the comparison of the specific results for suprasegmental or segmental instruction is beyond the scope of this study (for a review, see Gordon and Darcy (2016), Lee, Plonsky, and Saito (2020) and Zhang and Yuan (2020)). However, a significant finding from previous research is that pronunciation instruction tends to lead to more improvement gains when employing explicit techniques rather than implicit ones (THOMSON;DERWING, 2015;GORDON;DARCY, 2016).…”

The Effects of Talker Variability and Frequency of Exposure on the Acquisition of Spoken Word Knowledge

“…Last but not least, evidence of variability benefits in L2 pronunciation learning has predominantly come from work focusing on segmental (vowels and consonants) rather than suprasegmental aspects of language, such as rhythm, intonation, word stress, and fluency (Thomson, 2018). This is surprising because the important role of suprasegmentals has been increasingly recognized in L2 pronunciation teaching (Zhang & Yuan, 2020), and a growing number of studies have suggested that L2 production (e.g., measured through comprehensibility and intelligibility) is associated with a range of suprasegmental features including word stress (Field, 2005), sentence stress (Hahn, 2004), and temporal fluency (Suzuki & Kormos, 2020).…”