Effects of prosody awareness training on the intelligibility of Iranian interpreter trainees in English

Mahmood Yenkimaleki*, Vincent J. van Heuven

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journal/periodicalArticleScientificpeer-review

10 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

The present study investigates the effect of prosodic feature awareness training on the intelligibility of speech produced by Iranian interpreter trainees. Two groups of student interpreters were formed. All were native speakers of Farsi who studied English translation and interpreting at the BA level. Participants took a pretest of speaking skills before starting the program so that their speech intelligibility level was rated. The control group listened to authentic audio tracks in English and discussed their contents, watched authentic English movies, discussed issues in the movies in pairs in the classroom. The experimental group spent part of the time on theoretical explanation of, and practical exercises with, English prosody. Students then took a posttest in speaking skills so that the effect of treatment on the intelligibility of their speech could be assessed. The results show that the prosody awareness training significantly improved the students' speech intelligibility.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)291-309
Number of pages19
JournalDutch Journal of Applied Linguistics
Volume8
Issue number2
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 31 Dec 2019

Keywords

  • Awareness training
  • Curriculum design
  • Interpreter trainees
  • Prosody
  • Speech intelligibility

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