CATESOL

Segmental vs. Suprasegmental Training: EFL Classroom Insights (TOP-IG)

Date/Time

2/21/2025
12:00 PM - 1:00 PM Pacific

Event Registration

Event Type(s)

Prof Dev Meeting/Workshop
Interest Group (IG) Event

Event Description

J Gordon webinar ad

In this webinar, Joshua Gordon will discuss the results and pedagogical strategies underlying a pronunciation intervention designed by Gordon and colleague Isabelle Darcy to improve comprehensibility, fluency, and accentedness among three groups of second language (L2) learners in an English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) setting. The session will delve into the rationale behind content selection, the development of instructional materials, and the practical application of these methods in the intervention's three experimental groups.

This study involved providing explicit pronunciation instruction to three groups of first-semester EFL students at a small university in Costa Rica. The groups were as follows: one focused on suprasegmental features and connected speech (Suprasegmental Group), another on vowels and consonants (Segmental Group), and a third combining instruction in both segmentals and suprasegmentals (Mixed Group). Pretest and posttest spontaneous speech samples were evaluated by native English speakers for comprehensibility, fluency, and accentedness. The Suprasegmental Group showed significant improvements in comprehensibility and fluency, whereas the other groups did not demonstrate comparable gains. None of the groups exhibited improvement in accentedness. The webinar will conclude with a discussion of the pedagogical implications for implementing explicit pronunciation instruction in L2 classrooms.

Presenter

Joshua Gordon is an Associate Professor of TESOL and Applied Linguistics at the University of Northern Iowa. He received his Ph.D. in Second Language Studies from Indiana University, Bloomington. He has taught ESL, EFL, and Spanish as a foreign language. He has trained pre-service and in-service teachers in the United States and in Costa Rica. His research interests include second-language pronunciation teaching and learning, second-language teacher cognition, and nonnative-speaking teachers of English. He was the 2022-2023 chair of the Speech, Pronunciation, and Listening Interest Section of TESOL International. He is the Reviews Editor for the Journal of Second Language Pronunciation.