Segmental vs. Prosodic Approach to Listening Comprehension

Abstract

The present paper examines the effects of pronunciation teaching on listening comprehension in English. In particular, this paper compares the effects of traditional pronunciation teaching that focuses on individual sounds such as phonemes and minimal pairs, and teaching that focuses more on prosodic features of English such as phrase-level rhythm, linking and intonation phenomena. Two groups of 40 college students participated in this experiment. Each group was given 7 30- minute instruction and practice on the relevant aspects of pronunciation. A pretest and posttest were administered to test the significance of each treatment in the improvement of listening skills. Each test was also accompanied by a questionnaire in order to find out the needs and general listening strategies of the students. This paper will discuss the results of the experiment and suggest some implications for future research and English teaching in listening skills.