Training ESL students to reproduce beat gestures in discourse leads to L2 pronunciation improvements

Pilar Prieto Vives; Carmen Pérez Vidal; Olga Kushch; Joan Borràs-Comes; Daria Gluhareva

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Training ESL students to reproduce beat gestures in discourse leads to L2 pronunciation improvements

Pilar Prieto ^[1] ; Carmen Pérez-Vidal ^[1] ; Olga Kushch ^[2] ; Joan Borràs-Comes ^[3] ; Daria Gluhareva ^[4]
1. [1] Universitat Pompeu Fabra
  
  Universitat Pompeu Fabra
  
  Barcelona, España
2. [2] Universidad Nebrija
  
  Universidad Nebrija
  
  Madrid, España
3. [3] Universitat de Barcelona
  
  Universitat de Barcelona
  
  Barcelona, España
4. [4] Simon Fraser University
  
  Simon Fraser University
  
  Canadá
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Localización: Anuario del Seminario de Filología Vasca Julio de Urquijo: International journal of basque linguistics and philology, ISSN 0582-6152, Vol. 57, Nº. 1-2, 2023 (Ejemplar dedicado a: Jose Ignazio Hualderen Omenez: Ikerketak Fonologiaz eta Diakroniaz), págs. 805-823
Idioma: inglés
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Resumen
- The main goal of the present study is to assess whether training foreign language students to reproduce natural beat gestures in discourse can trigger pronunciation gains. A total of 18 young adult Catalan learners of English with an intermediate proficiency level participated in a 15-minute discourse-based pronunciation training session. Participants were randomly assigned to two groups. While one group was asked to simply repeat the instructor’s multimodal responses to discourse prompts by focusing on speech, the other group was asked to repeat the utterances together with the natural beat gestures that the instructor was using. Before and after training, participants were recorded producing a discourse completion task and their speech was rated for accentedness. Results showed that participants who accompanied their verbal repeti-tion with beat gestures during training significantly reduced their accentedness scores more than those who were asked to only repeat the utterances without reproducing the beat gestures. These results support recent findings that show the value of embodied prosodic training for pronuncia-tion instruction.