"From the Sound, It Look Like He Said It from the Deep in His Heart": How Do English Learners Make Judgments of Pragma-Prosodic Meaning?

Autor/in	Kermad, Alyssa
Titel	"From the Sound, It Look Like He Said It from the Deep in His Heart": How Do English Learners Make Judgments of Pragma-Prosodic Meaning?
Quelle	In: TESL-EJ, 25 (2021) 1, (25 Seiten)Infoseite zur Zeitschrift PDF als Volltext kostenfreie Datei Verfügbarkeit
Sprache	englisch
Dokumenttyp	gedruckt; online; Zeitschriftenaufsatz
ISSN	1072-4303
Schlagwörter	Intonation; Suprasegmentals; Second Language Learning; Second Language Instruction; English (Second Language); Teaching Methods; Intervention; Decision Making; Native Speakers; Pragmatics; Listening Comprehension Tests; Speech Acts; Intention; Intercultural Communication; Cues; Speech Communication; Grammar; Intensive Language Courses; Foreign Students; Undergraduate Students; Learning Strategies; Language Tests; Test of English as a Foreign Language + Suchen Sie Ihr Suchwort? Zweitsprachenerwerb; Fremdsprachenunterricht; English as second language; English; Second Language; Englisch als Zweitsprache; Teaching method; Lehrmethode; Unterrichtsmethode; Decision-making; Entscheidungsfindung; Muttersprachler; Pragmalinguistik; Hörverstehensübung; Sprechakt; Interkulturelle Kommunikation; Stichwort; Grammatik; Intensivkurs; Sprachkurs; Learning methode; Learning techniques; Lernmethode; Lernstrategie; Language test; Sprachtest
Abstract	Prosody communicates pragmatic meaning far beyond that which is evident at the surface level of an utterance and can pose challenges to learners' pragmatic comprehension. The current study investigated how second language (L2) English learners made decisions about speaker intent when communicated through prosody. Seventeen English L2 learners took a pragmatic listening test (adapted from Cohen, 2010) and made decisions about speaker intent across sixteen speech acts. Learners' responses were compared with 11-12 English native speakers' (NSs) responses. The learners provided open-ended rationales for how they made their decisions. Results demonstrated that for almost half the speech acts, all of which did not have a transparent pragmatic force, the learners relied primarily on the linguistic message and did not arrive at the same judgments as NSs did. In over half the cases when the learners did agree with NSs, the pragmatic force was transparent with the linguistic form. Overall, results demonstrate that pragma-prosodic meaning is challenging for learners. There is a need for teachers to provide pedagogical interventions to assist learners in interpreting a range of spoken cues, with a focus on prosodic properties, to decipher pragmatic meaning across a variety of speech acts. (As Provided).
Anmerkungen	TESL-EJ. e-mail: editor@tesl-ej.org; Web site: http://tesl-ej.org
Erfasst von	ERIC (Education Resources Information Center), Washington, DC
Update	2024/1/01