The role of L2 discourse intonation and prosody in public speakingA study of the form-function interface in Spanish University Students of English

Abstract

The present thesis aims to investigate the effects of a course-experiment on English intonation and prosodic forms and functions. To accomplish this, the researcher designed, implemented, and reported the findings from the use of prosody and intonation made by Spanish learners of English and English native speakers within the context of public speaking (cf. Tench, 1996; Cruttenden, 1997; Wells, 2006; DeVito, 2012). The purpose of the course-experiment is twofold. Firstly, to compare five prosodic parameters before and after an L2 discourse intonation training programme (cf. Brazil, Coulthard and Johns, 1980; Brazil, 1997; Chun, 2002). Secondly, to confirm whether the Spanish subjects, after the aforementioned L2 discourse intonation training, are able to match the form of these five prosodic parameters (cf. DuBois et al., 1992) and the different discourse-pragmatic functions (Ramírez-Verdugo, 2005; Romero-Trillo, 2012). The experimental training was implemented throughout eighteen input sessions (1,440 minutes total time) and all the sessions took place in the classroom. The non-native and native public speeches were acoustically analysed (7,356 words in total) and the results from the questionnaires were used to interpret the acoustic analysis. Results indicate that most of the Spanish learners of English at the end of their prosodic training produced a wider choice of the five prosodic parameters partly due to the prosodically-annotated transcripts that were developed throughout the L2 discourse intonation training. Conversely, the data also reveal that most of the Spanish learners of English failed to match the forms to their appropriate discourse-pragmatic functions (cf. Ramírez-Verdugo and Romero-Trillo, 2005) and therefore there is still an irregular acquisition of L2 prosodic competence even after explicit instruction