Presentation

Translanguaging in Prosody Teaching: Beyond Monolingual Ideology

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Abstract

Prosody plays an essential role in pronunciation teaching (Anderson-Hsieh, Johnson, & Koehler, 1992; Derwing, Munro, & Wiebe, 1998). However, some L2 English speakers do not use English prosody effectively (Pickering, 2001, Wennerstrom, 1998). In recent years, a number of studies have argued for similarities between the pragmatic functions of Mandarin and English prosody (Chen & Gussenhoven, 2008; Ouyang & Kaiser, 2015), suggesting the possibility of leveraging learners’ L1 into prosody teaching. However, research studies investigating the efficacy of cross-linguistic prosody pedagogy are lacking. This study investigates the efficacy of a monolingual (English) metalinguistic awareness enhancement based prosody teaching method (mono-MAET) and a translingual (English and Mandarin) metalinguistic awareness enhancement based prosody teaching method (trans-MAET) by analyzing the pitch height of the sentence stress in L2 English speakers’ read aloud speech. The participants who received trans- MAET demonstrated a statistically significant increase in the pitch height of the stressed constituents. This study informs teaching by showing that tapping into similar pragmatic functions across languages can lead to improvement.

How to Cite:

Liu, D., (2017) “Translanguaging in Prosody Teaching: Beyond Monolingual Ideology”, Pronunciation in Second Language Learning and Teaching Proceedings 9(1).