The effect of prosody teaching on developing word recognition skills for interpreter trainees: An experimental study
Journal Title: JOURNAL OF ADVANCES IN LINGUISTICS - Year 2016, Vol 7, Issue 1
Abstract
The present study investigates the effect of the explicit teaching of prosodic features on developing word recognition skills with interpreter trainees. Two groups of student interpreters were composed. All were native speakers of Farsi who studied English translation and interpreting at the BA level at the State University of Arak, Iran. Participants were categorized into two groups at random, but with equal division between genders (9 female and 9 male students in each group). No significant differences in English language skills (TOEFL scores) could be established between the groups. Participants took a pretest of word recognition skill before starting the program. The control group received exercises in listening comprehension, while the experimental group spent part of the time on theoretical explanation and practical exercises developing conscious knowledge of prosodic features of English, such as word stress. The total instruction time was the same for both groups, i.e. 8 hours. Students then took a posttest of word recognition skills. The results show that prosodic feature awareness training did yield a statistically significant improvement of word recognition skills. The result has pedagogical implications for researchers in the field of second language teaching, instructors, curriculum designers, conductors of interpreting programs for training future interpreters, material producers and all who are involved in language study and pedagogy.
Authors and Affiliations
Mahmood Yenkimaleki, Vincent J. van Heuven
Multimodal Analysis of Topic Shift in Persian Dyadic Conversations
Conversations play an important role in our daily life. During conversations, we usually talk from topic to topic automatically, smoothly and effortlessly. However, there are sometimes difficulties experienced in establi...
Language and Context in Inter-Cultural Communication
The text is considered as a final product which exists in the mind as the result of a mental activity. It is a unit of human action, interaction, communication and cognition which are based on the context. Background kno...
DYSLEXIA AND SPELLING IN TWO DIFFERENT ORTHOGRAPHIES (GREEK VS. ENGLISH): A LINGUISTIC ANALYSIS.
In our study spelling skills of 40 dyslexic (mean age 13,2 years) and 40 non dyslexic children (mean age 10,9 years) matched on the basis of their general level of language proficiency and foreign language acquisition, w...
The Linguistic Atlas of the East of Guilan on the Basis of Morphological Analysis (Lexical - Inflectional)
This article, in line with “The National Project of the Dialectology”, aims to provide a linguistic atlas in the East of Guilan province. Due to the large number of speakers in the southern edge of the Caspian Sea and ma...
Akokoid Comparative Wordlist
Akokoid, in this paper, refers to the nine speech forms which are spoken in Akoko North-West Local Government Area of Ondo State in South-Western Nigeria. These speech forms are Arigidi, Erushu, Afa, Oge, Aje, Udo, Oyin,...