Presentation
Author: Di Liu (Boston University)
Prosody plays an essential role in pronunciation teaching (Anderson-Hsieh, Johnson, & Koehler, 1992; Derwing, Munro, & Wiebe, 1998). However, some L2 English speakers do not use English prosody effectively (Pickering, 2001, Wennerstrom, 1998). In recent years, a number of studies have argued for similarities between the pragmatic functions of Mandarin and English prosody (Chen & Gussenhoven, 2008; Ouyang & Kaiser, 2015), suggesting the possibility of leveraging learners’ L1 into prosody teaching. However, research studies investigating the efficacy of cross-linguistic prosody pedagogy are lacking. This study investigates the efficacy of a monolingual (English) metalinguistic awareness enhancement based prosody teaching method (mono-MAET) and a translingual (English and Mandarin) metalinguistic awareness enhancement based prosody teaching method (trans-MAET) by analyzing the pitch height of the sentence stress in L2 English speakers’ read aloud speech. The participants who received trans- MAET demonstrated a statistically significant increase in the pitch height of the stressed constituents. This study informs teaching by showing that tapping into similar pragmatic functions across languages can lead to improvement.
Keywords:
How to Cite: Liu, D. (2017) “Translanguaging in Prosody Teaching: Beyond Monolingual Ideology”, Pronunciation in Second Language Learning and Teaching Proceedings. 9(1).