Innovation in Language Learning
How to Mediate Prosody in Foreign Language Teaching?
Mirena Patseva, Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski” (Bulgaria)
Abstract
Lexical stress is among the major difficulties in acquiring Bulgarian as a foreign language. Teaching prosody involves presenting the features of a particular language, raising learners' awareness of them, and fostering their automatization. This study focuses on the second, more challenging aspect — awareness. Our hypothesis is that oral mediation tasks are particularly effective in raising awareness of word stress, as they require not merely reproduction, but active processing of content for another audience. The study addressed the following research questions: (1) How can research findings be incorporated into practical language teaching? (2) What mediation strategies do students use when conveying specific information? (3) Does Praat analysis of the recordings indicate improvement compared to previous data? To facilitate acquisition, a mediation task was employed, involving the relaying of information, explanation of data, and processing of text. Fourteen students participated in the study. Following a pronunciation lecture and a training session, they were assigned a task to produce a 3–5-minute video recording in which they orally explained the regularities, using their own examples. The data consisted of audio recordings, transcribed and analyzed using Praat. In the following class, students discussed the recordings and evaluated them according to the following parameters: (A.) Parameters related to task performance: appropriate selection of relevant information and illustrative examples; mediation strategies used. (B.) Parameters related to the pronunciation of segmental and suprasegmental features: production of stressed and unstressed syllables and clitics; reduction of unstressed vowels. Automatic transcriptions of the recordings still reveal typical substitutions, such as /r/–/l/ confusion and voicing/devoicing errors. The study demonstrates that mediating linguistic information to a peer is a complex and cognitively demanding skill, and it contributes to the integration of academic research findings into language teaching practice.
Keywords: mediation, lexical stress, teaching prosody, L2 Bulgarian
