The effects of prosody instruction on listening comprehension in an EAP classroom context

Abstract

In many English language teaching contexts, listening activities resemble listening comprehension tests. Scholars have argued that this product-oriented approach is not particularly effective in helping learners improve their listening skills and have advocated for the inclusion of instruction that targets specific features of spoken language. The current study tested these claims in the context of an English-for-academic-purposes (EAP) listening and speaking course. Sixty-four post-secondary learners of English were randomly assigned to one of two groups. In addition to their regularly scheduled listening activities, one group received 100 minutes of instruction for two prosodic features (paratone and prosodic phrasing), while the other group received an equal amount of product-oriented listening instruction. After the instructional treatment, learners in the prosody group outperformed those in the product-oriented group on comprehension of the target prosodic features, and on general listening proficiency tests. It is argued that short periods of instruction targeting prosodic features can improve the effectiveness of traditional product-oriented EAP listening instruction.

The effect of prosody instruction in developing listening comprehension skills by interpreter trainees: does methodology matter?

“…Prior studies have found that pronunciation instruction can improve L2 learners' global listening comprehension skills as long as enough time is allotted for prosody instruction (e.g., McAndrews, 2020;Kato & Tanaka, 2015;Yenkimaleki & Van Heuven, 2016). Prior studies also have found that the application of CAPT (e.g., Adair-Hauck et al, 2000;Neri et al, 2001;Chang & Hsu, 2016;Tsai, 2019;Yenkimaleki & Van Heuven, 2019) in language education would benefit EFL learners.…”

“…The findings suggest that the BPI methodology be employed for developing listening comprehension skills by interpreter trainees. Earlier studies emphasized the inclusion of prosody training in EFL curricula (e.g., Oxford, 2002;Carrier, 2003;Chamot, 2004;Graham et al, 2011, Yenkimaleki & Van Heuven, 2020 for developing listening comprehension skills (e.g., McAndrews, 2020;Baştuğ & Keskin, 2012;Kato & Tanaka, 2015;Yenkimaleki & Van Heuven, 2016). Prosody awareness training plays an instrumental role in the encoding and decoding of meaning (e.g., Oxford, 2002;Carrier, 2003).…”

“…Segmentation of continuous speech into syllables, words and phrases, informing syntactic structure, and emphasizing content words and other salient information are prosodic functions that facilitate the processing of speech (e.g., Chamot, 2004;Graham et al, 2011). Successful decoding input speech in the non-native language may benefit from an explicit comparison of the prosodic properties of his native language and those of the L2 (e.g., McAndrews, 2020;Baştuğ & Keskin, 2012).…”

“…Although listening comprehension is one of the important skills in second-language (L2) acquisition (Oxford, 1993;Yenkimaleki, 2017), the teaching and learning of this skill have been seriously understudied (McAndrews, 2020).…”

The Diversification of College English Listening Course Teaching under the Background of Informationization

“…Literature [14] examined the impact of cognitive inhibition and its components on spoken word segmentation by examining the correlation between English listening level, cognitive inhibition, and SWS performance. Literature [15] advocates the incorporation of oral features into the listening curriculum, and experimental tests with ELLs show that teaching oral prosody features could improve EAP listening instruction. Literature [16] examined the indirect as well as the direct effects of vocabulary knowledge and grammatical skills on listening and reading comprehension in L2 learning by comparing experimental classes, showing us that vocabulary knowledge and grammar skills have a direct and indirect effect on listening and reading comprehension in L2 learning, and that vocabulary knowledge and grammar skills have a direct and indirect effect on listening and reading comprehension in L2 learning by comparing experimental classes.…”