Teaching prosody awareness in spontaneous speech for non-linguistic students

Abstract

The paper reports on the findings of the study of prosody in teaching spontaneous speech production. Insufficient development of a scientifically based methodology for building oral language skills, taking into account its prosodic characteristics, determines the relevance of the study. The main goal of the research is to correct the methodology of teaching spontaneous learner talk, based on the results of experimental phonetic research. The research methodology is based on an integrated approach using linguistic methods of experimental phonetic research, as well as methods of psychological and pedagogic research. The results of phonetic experiment of 97 monolingual utterances of undergraduate students, non-English majors (total running 190 minutes) show a summary of commonly occurring problems that lead to non-native intonation. These problems are mostly related to improper segmentation, wrong distribution of the utterance stress, incorrect rhythmic organisation of speech, break of intonation continuum, inappropriate intonation patterns and melodic contour. The proposed prosodic focus on teaching spontaneous monologue speech includes the following stages: sensitisation, imitation, reading with prosody and practice activities. Methodological recommendations contain specific proposals for teaching sentence stress, syntagmatic division, pausing, intonation and rhythmics of spontaneous speech.