The effect of prosody instruction in developing listening comprehension skills by interpreter trainees: does methodology matter?

Abstract

In the present study, three groups of interpreter trainees were formed, two experimental groups, i.e., blended prosody instruction (BPI) and computer-assisted prosody training (CAPT), and one control group (CON). In this experiment the participants took part in a four-week teaching program for 16 sessions (60 minutes per session), i.e., 16 hours in all. The participants were native Persian speakers who studied English interpreting at the BA level in Iran. The control group listened to authentic audio tracks or watched authentic English movies, discussed their contents, and did exercises based on these tasks for developing listening comprehension skills during the full 16 hours. The CAPT group spent one-third of the time (320 minutes) instead on prosody training using Accent Master Software. The BPI group did this for only 160 minutes but spent the other 160 minutes on theoretical explanations of prosody, and did practical exercises with prosodic structures supervised by an expert human instructor. Students then took a posttest in listening comprehension skills. The results revealed that the BPI group outperformed the other groups in developing listening comprehension skills. This conclusion may have pedagogical implications for interpreter training programs, foreign language instructors, and interpreting practitioners.

Keywords:

• CAPT
• BPI
• prosody training
• interpreter trainees
• listening comprehension skills

Acknowledgement

We would like to thank all the students who collaborated with us in this experiment.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Captioning refers to the process by which the audio content of a video, such as speech and other sounds, is converted into texts and are displayed on the screen (Hayati & Mohmedi, 2011).

2 https://www.pearson.ch/LanguageTeaching/Exams/TOEFL/EAN/9780131408838/Longman-Preparation-Course-for-the-TOEFL-Test-The-Paper-Test-Book-and-CD-ROM-with-Answer-Key

3 http://pearson.es/espa%C3%B1a/TiendaOnline/longman-preparation-course-for-the-toefl-test-the-paper-test-with-an

4 Similarly small (but significant) effects of prosodic training on the development of listening comprehension in EFL were reported recently by Luu et al. (2021). A control group of 30 Thai students took a 10-hour listening comprehension training using traditional methods with no special emphasis on prosody. The experimental group (N = 35) received computer-aided prosody training instead. The groups were roughly equal on the pretest (7.9 vs 8.4 points, on a scale from 0 to 30) but differed significantly on the posttest (9.3 vs 11.3). The experimental design, however, precludes assessing the separate contributions of emphasis on prosody and of using CALL.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Mahmood Yenkimaleki

Mahmood Yenkimaleki (PhD) is a researcher at VU University Amsterdam and assistant professor of interpreting studies at University of Nahavand, Iran. His area of interest is interpreting studies and applied linguistics. Email: [email protected]

Vincent J. van Heuven

Vincent J. van Heuven (PhD) is an emeritus professor of Experimental Linguistics and Phonetics and former director of the Leiden University Centre for Linguistics. He is now a professor at the University of Pannonia in Veszprém, Hungary. He is a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. Email: [email protected]

Hossein Moradimokhles

Hossein Moradimokhles (PhD) is an Assistant Professor of Educational Technology at Sayyed Jamaleddin Asadaabadi University. Email: [email protected]