Explicit Rules or Implicit Imitation: A Comparative Study of Two Approaches to Teaching English Prosody

This study aims to explore the effect of explicit and implicit instructions on improving English pronunciation as far as stress production is concerned. 28 tertiary level Chinese EFL learners were divided equally into two groups and attended a pronunciation training course of eight 30-minute sessions using the two approaches in question respectively. All participants took a pretest before the treatment and the identical test on completion of the training as the posttest, consisting of a controlled reading task of a series of words followed by sentences/dialogues that particularly show tonic stress, contrastive stress, and emphatic stress. Participants’ recordings were analyzed acoustically on PRAAT. Readings of intensity peaks and F0 averages for each syllable at word-level and for each word at sentence-level were obtained. These values were then processed in order to obtain the difference in amplitude and F0 between stressed and unstressed syllables/words. The statistical results generated from a series of repeated measures ANOVAs revealed that, while both groups improved their pronunciation in stress production in the posttest, the improvement seemed more pronounced in the explicit group. The findings provided credence for the feasibility of instructing suprasegmental aspects of speech in language classrooms and especially highlighted the advantages of explicit instruction.