著者

SONOBE Hideyuki UEDA Makoto YAMANE Shigeru

出版者

外国語教育メディア学会

雑誌

Language education & technology (ISSN:04587332)

巻号頁・発行日

no.46, pp.41-60, 2009-06

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It has often been suggested that prosody, encompassing rhythm, accent and intonation, contributes greatly to the production of natural-sounding English and furthermore, that these suprasegmental elements play an important role in successful communication. Japanese EFL learners, influenced by the mora-timed rhythm of their mother tongue, tend to use Japanese rhythmic patterns when they speak English. This study attempts to demonstrate how the authors' original animated Web materials focusing on English rhythm enabled students to improve their English pronunciation. From our experiment, carried out once a week for five weeks in a CALL classroom, some positive effects of rhythmic pronunciation practice were found on the learners' pronunciation. Clear correlations among the speech duration, pitch ranges, and naturalness of the English produced by Japanese EFL learners were also found.