The implicit prosody hypothesis applied to foreign language learning: From oral abilities to reading skills

Abstract

This study investigates the positive influence of oral skills' training on reading abilities for learners of French as a foreign language. We hypothesize that teaching prosody, especially at an early stage of the learning process, will not only improve students' speech fluency and pronunciation skills, but also dramatically improve their strategies to decode written speech. We conducted a longitudinal study over eight weeks with four English students of French, split into a Control Group, where the teacher focused on reading comprehension, and a Test Group, where she emphasized phonetic correction and prosodic abilities. Both acoustic and perception data indicate an improvement in reading fluency within the Test Group only, especially for the beginner student.