This study investigates the effect of explicit teaching of prosodic features on developing listening comprehension by interpreter trainees. Two groups of student interpreters were formed. All were... Show moreThis study investigates the effect of explicit teaching of prosodic features on developing listening comprehension by interpreter trainees. Two groups of student interpreters were formed. All were native speakers of Farsi who studied English translation and interpreting at the BA level at the State University of Arak, Iran. Participants were assigned to groups at random, but with equal division between genders (9 female and 9 male students in each group). No significant differences in English language skills (TOEFL scores) could be established between the groups. Participants took a standard pretest of listening comprehension before starting the program. The control group had exercises in listening comprehension, while the experimental group spent part of the time on theoretical explanation of, and practical exercises with, prosodic features of English. The total instruction time was the same for both groups, i.e. 8 hours. Students then took a standard listening comprehension test. The results show that the prosodic feature awareness training significantly improved the students’ listening comprehension skills. The results have pedagogical implications for curriculum designers, interpreting programs for training future interpreters, material producers and all who are involved in language study and pedagogy. Show less
The present study investigates the effect of the explicit teaching of prosodic features on developing word recognition skills with interpreter trainees. Two groups of student interpreters were... Show moreThe present study investigates the effect of the explicit teaching of prosodic features on developing word recognition skills with interpreter trainees. Two groups of student interpreters were composed. All were native speakers of Farsi who studied English translation and interpreting at the BA level at the State University of Arak, Iran. Participants were categorized into two groups at random, but with equal division between genders (9 female and 9 male students in each group). No significant differences in English language skills (TOEFL scores) could be established between the groups. Participants took a pretest of word recognition skill before starting the program. The control group received exercises in listening comprehension, while the experimental group spent part of the time on theoretical explanation and practical exercises developing conscious knowledge of prosodic features of English, such as word stress. The total instruction time was the same for both groups, i.e. 8 hours. Students then took a posttest of word recognition skills. The results show that prosodic feature awareness training did yield a statistically significant improvement of word recognition skills. The result has pedagogical implications for researchers in the field of second language teaching, instructors, curriculum designers, conductors of interpreting programs for training future interpreters, material producers and all who are involved in language study and pedagogy. Show less
Heuven, V.J. van; Gooskens, C.S.; Bezooijen, R. van 2015
We determined the mutual intelligibility Mandarin Chinese, Dutch and American speakers of English in all nine logically possible combinations of speaker and listener native language backgrounds.... Show moreWe determined the mutual intelligibility Mandarin Chinese, Dutch and American speakers of English in all nine logically possible combinations of speaker and listener native language backgrounds. Designated speakers (one male, one female per language group) were selected from larger sets of 20 speakers so as to be optimally representative of their peer groups. All non-native speakers and listeners were university students who did not specialize in English and had never lived in an English speaking community. Intelligibility was tested in separate tests targeting vowels, onset consonants, onset consonant clusters, words in syntactically correct but semantically empty sentences (SUS test), and words in meaningful sentences in which they appeared in either low or high predictability contexts. We test the hypotheses that mutual intelligibility between speaker and listener is better as (i) their native languages resemble each other more, and (ii) if speaker and listener share the same native language. In order to test the second hypothesis we propose a new method for quantifying the so-called interlanguage speech intelligibility benefit (ISIB). Show less
The present study investigates whether immediate repetition improves consecutive interpreting performance during training. In addition, the study tries to shed light on whether the effects of... Show moreThe present study investigates whether immediate repetition improves consecutive interpreting performance during training. In addition, the study tries to shed light on whether the effects of immediate repetition differ between BA and MA interpreting trainees. In the experiment, ten raters judged six major quality measures of the accuracy and fluency of the interpreting output recorded from seven BA trainees and five MA trainees. The seventh quality measure expressed linguistic complexity as the number of clauses per AS-unit. The results show that the main effects of repetition and proficiency are both significant on accuracy and fluency, but the main effects are absent on linguistic complexity. Moreover, in terms of fluency BA trainees benefit significantly more from repetition than MA trainees. Accuracy improvement through repetition does not differ significantly between the two groups. The results have implications for consecutive interpreting training at different stages. Show less
