The Effects of Communicative Pronunciation Instruction on Suprasegmental Performance in an EFL Context

Abstract

This study investigated the effects of communicative suprasegmental instruction on Iranian EFL learners’ pronunciation performance. To this end, 24 pre-intermediate EFL learners were randomly assigned to two groups: the experimental group receiving communicative pronunciation instruction in which after receiving conventional explicit instruction students were given communicative tasks to practice learned features, and the control group receiving only conventional explicit exercise-based instruction. The learners’ pronunciations were assessed in controlled read-aloud and communicative picture-description/picture-driven contexts in terms of two suprasegmental features (i.e. compound words stress and interrogative intonation). The results of the study revealed that the explicit exercise-based instruction was significantly effective in controlled contexts but modestly effective in communicative picture-description and picture-driven tasks. On the contrary, communicative pronunciation instruction was not only significantly effective in the controlled context but also in communicative tasks. This finding reveals that communicative suprasegmental instruction is more effective than conventional explicit instruction in both controlled and communicative language production contexts. In the end, some pedagogical implications of the findings are also discussed.