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ERIC Number: EJ1302431
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2021-May
Pages: 25
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: EISSN-1072-4303
EISSN: N/A
"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?
Kermad, Alyssa
TESL-EJ, v25 n1 May 2021
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.
TESL-EJ. e-mail: editor@tesl-ej.org; Web site: http://tesl-ej.org
Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research; Tests/Questionnaires
Education Level: Higher Education; Postsecondary Education
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Identifiers - Assessments and Surveys: Test of English as a Foreign Language
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A