Englishville: a Multi-Sensorial Tool for Prosody

Abstract

Research has shown that prosody plays an important role in the intelligibility, comprehensibility and accentedness of non-native discourse (Munro and Derwing, 1995, 1998). Yet prosody is deemed difficult to teach (Setter et al., 2010). Previous studies have used software such as PRAAT (Setter et al., 2010, Olson, 2014, Imber et al., 2017,) but they can be complex to use (Setter et al., 2010; Setter and Jenkins, 2005). Could a more comprehensive tool be useful to L2 learners? Englishville is a website where it is possible for the learner to see a real-time 3D spectrogram.
An experiment was set up to determine whether multi-sensorial input, available via Englishville can help learners of English. Eight French students enrolled in a BA in English took part in this initial trial experiment (2 per group). They were divided into four groups. The corpus is divided into 2 parts. The first focuses on lexical word stress (72 words) and the second on intonation in 30 short sentences. The corpus was recorded by a female native British speaker. All participants had one trial at the beginning of the experiment to familiarise themselves with the tool and they all read and recorded the words and phrases as they appeared on the screen. The first group only had access to this text (no input) before recording their own productions whereas the other 3 groups received supplementary input. Group 2 read the text and heard the corresponding audio (audio input), group 3 read the text and saw the corresponding 3D spectrogram (visual input) and group 4 read the text, heard the audio and saw the corresponding 3D spectrogram (multi-sensorial input).
An auditive analysis leads us to believe that both hearing speech and seeing the corresponding spectrogram is beneficial, especially for intonation. Positive results came from the students’ feedback; they generally found the tool useful, easy to use, fun and interesting.