Effects of Teaching Methods on Intonation Patterns of Japanese Learners of English

概要

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This study examines the production of English intonation patterns by Japanese learners of English. A production experiment was conducted to determine the effects of different methods used to teach intonation patterns bearing contrastive stress. A traditional method, listening to the English of a native speaker, was compared with another method of teaching pronunciation with an intonation training machine. The experiment demonstrated that the intonation training machine is much more effective than the traditional method. This training exerted an influence on the listening judgments made by a native speaker of English. We also found that it was easy for Japanese learners to improve the sentence-final intonation, while it was difficult for them to improve the sentence-initial intonation. Improving the intonation in the middle of a sentence was found to be as easy as that of the sentence-final intonation, if the sentence was short. Also, we observed the retention of the intonation acquired through the training. The results of this study indicate that pronunciation teaching with visual aids is very effective in improving the English of Japanese speakers.
順天堂大学の論文