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THE ROLE OF TASK REPETITION IN LEARNING WORD-STRESS PATTERNS THROUGH AUDITORY PRIMING TASKS

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 April 2017

YeonJoo Jung ,
YouJin Kim  and
John Murphy
YeonJoo Jung*
Affiliation:
Georgia State University
YouJin Kim
Affiliation:
Georgia State University
John Murphy
Affiliation:
Georgia State University
*
*Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to YeonJoo Jung, Department of Applied Linguistics & ESL, Georgia State University, 15th floor, 25 Park Place, Atlanta, GA 30303. E-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

This study focused on an instructional component often neglected when teaching the pronunciation of English as either a second, foreign, or international language—namely, the suprasegmental feature of lexical stress. Extending previous research on collaborative priming tasks and task repetition, the study investigated the impact of task and procedural repetition on eliciting target-stress patterns during collaborative priming tasks. It employed a pretest-posttest design with 57 Korean high school students who were randomly assigned to one of three groups: a control, priming with task repetition, and priming with procedural repetition. Learners participated in a pretest, two priming sessions, and two posttests over a 4-week period. Learners’ ability to produce target-stress patterns was measured through sentence read-aloud tasks. The task repetition group repeated the same primes and prompts twice, whereas the procedural repetition group performed priming tasks with different primes and prompts during two sessions. Results indicate that the amount of primed production was significantly more than unprimed production. Additionally, both experimental conditions promoted learners’ accurate production of target-stress patterns, though, in relation to long-term impacts, repeating the same task (i.e., same procedure and same content) twice was more effective than repeating the procedure for a second time with different content. The results are discussed in light of pronunciation teaching using auditory priming tasks.

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Articles
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Studies in Second Language Acquisition , Volume 39 , Special Issue 2: TBLT and L2 Pronunciation: Do the Benefits of Tasks Extend Beyond Grammar and Lexis? , June 2017 , pp. 319 - 346
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017 

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Footnotes

We would like to thank the editors and three anonymous reviewers who provided helpful comments on earlier versions of this article. Special thanks go to the editors of the special issue, Laura Gurzynski-Weiss, Avizia Y. Long, and Megan Solon for their insightful and valuable suggestions. Any remaining errors are our own.

References

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