TY - JOUR
T1 - The effect of prosody instruction in developing listening comprehension skills by interpreter trainees
T2 - does methodology matter?
AU - Yenkimaleki, Mahmood
AU - van Heuven, Vincent J.
AU - Moradimokhles, Hossein
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
PY - 2021
Y1 - 2021
N2 - In the present study, three groups of interpreter trainees were formed, two experimental groups, i.e., blended prosody instruction (BPI) and computer-assisted prosody training (CAPT), and one control group (CON). In this experiment the participants took part in a four-week teaching program for 16 sessions (60 minutes per session), i.e., 16 hours in all. The participants were native Persian speakers who studied English interpreting at the BA level in Iran. The control group listened to authentic audio tracks or watched authentic English movies, discussed their contents, and did exercises based on these tasks for developing listening comprehension skills during the full 16 hours. The CAPT group spent one-third of the time (320 minutes) instead on prosody training using Accent Master Software. The BPI group did this for only 160 minutes but spent the other 160 minutes on theoretical explanations of prosody, and did practical exercises with prosodic structures supervised by an expert human instructor. Students then took a posttest in listening comprehension skills. The results revealed that the BPI group outperformed the other groups in developing listening comprehension skills. This conclusion may have pedagogical implications for interpreter training programs, foreign language instructors, and interpreting practitioners. Supplemental data for this article is available online at https://doi.org/10.1080/09588221.2021.1957942.
AB - In the present study, three groups of interpreter trainees were formed, two experimental groups, i.e., blended prosody instruction (BPI) and computer-assisted prosody training (CAPT), and one control group (CON). In this experiment the participants took part in a four-week teaching program for 16 sessions (60 minutes per session), i.e., 16 hours in all. The participants were native Persian speakers who studied English interpreting at the BA level in Iran. The control group listened to authentic audio tracks or watched authentic English movies, discussed their contents, and did exercises based on these tasks for developing listening comprehension skills during the full 16 hours. The CAPT group spent one-third of the time (320 minutes) instead on prosody training using Accent Master Software. The BPI group did this for only 160 minutes but spent the other 160 minutes on theoretical explanations of prosody, and did practical exercises with prosodic structures supervised by an expert human instructor. Students then took a posttest in listening comprehension skills. The results revealed that the BPI group outperformed the other groups in developing listening comprehension skills. This conclusion may have pedagogical implications for interpreter training programs, foreign language instructors, and interpreting practitioners. Supplemental data for this article is available online at https://doi.org/10.1080/09588221.2021.1957942.
KW - BPI
KW - CAPT
KW - interpreter trainees
KW - listening comprehension skills
KW - prosody training
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85114369704&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1080/09588221.2021.1957942
DO - 10.1080/09588221.2021.1957942
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85114369704
SN - 0958-8221
JO - Computer Assisted Language Learning
JF - Computer Assisted Language Learning
ER -