“Read It Like You Mean It”: Developing Prosodic Reading Using Reader’s Theater

Abstract

Prosody is a linguistic feature in spoken English that is complex yet plays an important role in oral communication. Nevertheless, many EFL pronunciation classes in Thailand have not adequately emphasized the importance and functions of prosody to learners. This research study aims to investigate effect of an oral fluency instructional method called Reader’s Theater on Thai EFL university students’ perception and production of the prosodic features of pausing and sentence final intonation. The participants of this study are 22 Thai university students majoring in English. The results revealed that the students’ perception of these prosodic features increased and that the production of prosody shows correlation with comprehensibility. These results also suggest that effective modelling of oral fluency as an input is crucial to the perception of learners, and ultimately that prosody should be implemented in pronunciation classes in the EFL curriculum.