Innovation in Language Learning

   This study aims at developing CALL materials to facilitate the acquisition of prosody by EFL learners. Prosodic properties of speech, including pitch, intensity and duration help the listener identify pragmatically and semantically salient elements of an utterance such as question and focus (Healey, 2003). Pitch range also detects foreign accents of L2 English (Wennerstrom, 2000). L2 learners have difficulty in producing prosodic focus marking due to crosslinguistic variations in implementing new information focus (Gut & Pillai, 2014). For instance, English foci are marked prosodically and their placement is flexible, depending on the context. In contrast, Japanese foci are marked morphologically (Kuno, 1973) and the prosodic prominence, namely, the highest pitch tends to be placed on the sentence-initial word (Pierrehumbert & Beckman, 1988). We anticipate that L1-Japanese L2-English learners will face a learning problem. Traditionally, such L2 learners have been given oral instructions to improve their prosodic melody.

   The present study examines whether the recent technology of speech visualization can be another medium of teaching prosody. Thirty-eight Japanese EFL learners at CEFR level A2 participated in our experiment. They were divided into two groups. One group was given oral instructions explicitly telling where to put the stress in question-answer congruence. The other group was shown Praat images of model speech where the highest pitch was clearly detected, while listening to the audio stimuli. Both groups took three 10-minute instruction sessions. Before and after the sessions, they were asked to read several question-and-answer dialogs aloud in pairs. Their utterances were recorded in Audacity and their pitch melodies were analyzed in Praat. The results of both groups in the production task show the inappropriate prosodic prominence at the beginning of the sentence and the narrow pitch range at the pretest. Their performance greatly improved in producing prosodic focus marking and in pitch range at the posttest. These results suggest visual instructions are as effective as oral instructions in learning L2 prosody. Such visual instructions can be used on ubiquitous devices to facilitate L2 learners’ self-access learning.