The present study investigates the effect of explicit teaching of prosody ondeveloping speaking skills for Farsi-English interpreter trainees. Two groups of studentinterpreters were formed. All were native speakers of Farsi who studied English translationand interpreting at the BA level at Tafresh University, Iran. Participants were assigned togroups at random, but with equal division between genders (6 female and 6 male students ineach group). No significant differences in English language skills (TOEFL scores) could beestablished between the groups. Participants took a pretest before starting the program. Thecontrol group listened to authentic audio tracks in English and discussed their contents,watched authentic English movies, discussed issues in the movies and other hot topics, inpairs in the classroom. The experimental group spent part of the time on theoreticalexplanation of, and practical exercises with, prosodic features of English. The totalinstruction time was the same for both groups, i.e. 21 hours. Students then took a posttest inspeaking skills. The results show that the prosodic feature awareness training significantlyimproved the students’ speaking skills. These results have pedagogical implications forcurriculum designers, interpreting programs for training future interpreters, materialproducers and all who are involved in language study and pedagogy.
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