Language rhythm is a suprasegmental feature whose teaching within the EFL classroom can help students improve their L2 global prosody. This paper documents a longitudinal study conducted with ESP students at Rovira i Virgili University (Tarragona, Spain). Two groups were established: the experimental group, which received explicit rhythm instruction, and the control group, which did not. Both groups participated in ten weekly pronunciation sessions following Celce-Murcia’s communicative framework and adapted to the technical context of the course. This study investigates the extent to which rhythm training positively influences students’ prosody by analyzing ten sentences uttered before and after the instruction and measuring their VarcoV values. Results show that the experimental group tends to increase their VarcoV values after training, adopting a more English-like rhythm, while the control group behaves incongruently. Despite ANOVAs and t-tests not always being significant, the effect sizes of the differences between pre- and post-instruction reach significance.
Cite as: Quesada Vázquez, L., Romero, J. (2018) The improvement of Spanish/Catalan EFL students' prosody by means of explicit rhythm instruction. Proc. International Symposium on Applied Phonetics (ISAPh 2018), 104-109, doi: 10.21437/ISAPh.2018-19
@inproceedings{quesadavazquez18_isaph,
author={Leticia {Quesada Vázquez} and Joaquín Romero},
title={{The improvement of Spanish/Catalan EFL students' prosody by means of explicit rhythm instruction}},
year=2018,
booktitle={Proc. International Symposium on Applied Phonetics (ISAPh 2018)},
pages={104--109},
doi={10.21437/ISAPh.2018-19}
}