This study explores students’ progress in English pronunciation as far as stress is concerned, by creating online materials to develop their pronunciation skills. The study was carried out with two groups of first year university students. The activities were divided into four sections: overview, background, perception and production. While the experimental group recorded themselves using an integrated recording tool in the website, listened to the native speaker and then reflected on the differences between their production and the native speaker production, the control group listened to a native speaker and repeated the words afterwards. Both groups took a level test and a pre-test. After finishing the training, they took a post-test. Their recordings were evaluated using acoustic analysis with the Praat speech analysis software [1]. Each syllable in the words and phrases was identified in the acoustic signal and a reading of the intensity peak was obtained. These values were then processed in order to obtain the difference in amplitude between the stressed and the unstressed syllables. Preliminary results show that while both groups improved their pronunciation, the improvement was more pronounced in the experimental group. This seems to provide evidence of the benefits of the use of information technologies in the learning of pronunciation in the classroom.
Cite as: Kebboua, N., Romero, J. (2018) Integrating information technology in the teaching of English pronunciation: Designing and implementing an online course to teach word and sentence stress to tertiary level students. Proc. International Symposium on Applied Phonetics (ISAPh 2018), 73-78, doi: 10.21437/ISAPh.2018-13
@inproceedings{kebboua18_isaph,
author={Nadia Kebboua and Joaquín Romero},
title={{Integrating information technology in the teaching of English pronunciation: Designing and implementing an online course to teach word and sentence stress to tertiary level students}},
year=2018,
booktitle={Proc. International Symposium on Applied Phonetics (ISAPh 2018)},
pages={73--78},
doi={10.21437/ISAPh.2018-13}
}