Online guided pronunciation practice helps adult EFL learners improve L2 prosody

Abstract

This study tests the efficacy of a pronunciation course in developing advanced EFL learners’ expressive reading during a semester of online instruction. The course, designed for future English-language professionals, emphasises primacy of perception before production, the importance of noticing phonetic detail, expert and peer feedback, and context-situated tasks. The magnitude of pitch movements and reading tempo were assessed before and after the course for a trained group, who received the pronunciation practice, and a comparison group attending a course about the theory and research of foreign accents in English. Only the Trained group’s expressive prosody improved: the learners slowed down their delivery and produced the utterances with a wider pitch range. The results suggest that adult foreign language learners can benefit from pronunciation training in a distance learning environment.