Presentation

A Combination of Metalinguistic Instruction and Task Repetition in Teaching Chinese Prosody

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Abstract

When learning Mandarin,where f0 differentiates word meanings and carries higher-order communicative function, prosody errors cause reduced comprehensibility (Yang, 2016). Thus, teaching prosody in Mandarin is critical to improving students’ pronunciation. We compared three classes of L2 Chinese learners’ prosody at the sentence level. The Control group recorded a list of target sentences in a scripted dialogue after doinga role-play activity in class at Time 1. Two trainee groups (Task-Repetition and No-Repetition groups) whodid the same role-play activity receivedadditionalexplicit prosody teaching. They recorded the target sentences after the explicit teaching as Time 1 recording. Then the Task-Repetition group repeated the role-play activity while the NoRepetitiongroup did not. All three groups recorded the same target sentences at Time 2. The resultsshowed that both training groups had significantly bettercomprehensibility ratings than the Control group at Time 1, and the Task-Repetition group retained the gain but the No-Repetition group did not at Time 2. These findings suggestthat task repetition is necessary to maintain learned prosodicpatterns.

How to Cite:

Liu, J., (2019) “A Combination of Metalinguistic Instruction and Task Repetition in Teaching Chinese Prosody”, Pronunciation in Second Language Learning and Teaching Proceedings 11(1).