The Effects of Prosodic Features on Algerian Students’ Pronunciation of English and their Improvement: Toward a Didactic Proposal

Abstract

The present study deals with the RP English intonation produced by EFL Oranee learners (a variety of the Algerian language). The research seeks first to describe the English intonation of those speakers in terms of tone choice when producing declarative questions during their read speech. Yet, before conducting this study, the intonation features of the interrogative tones of the Algerian Oranee dialect in the same context will be described, with the goal of providing a basic characterization of it. Next, the research concentrates on testing the efficiency of two teaching intonation methods; a distracted imitation technique versus phonetic awareness through multimedia. The results of the pre-test recordings show that a rising melodic contour in the last stressed syllable of the final word is produced in Arabic declarative questions. It also proves that the informants produced English declarative questions using a compulsory rising terminal contour above 30Hertz. The post-test recordings reveal that the Oranee EFL learners improved their performance after both trainings. Therefore, distracted imitation learning and video awareness based on explanations are efficient in learning English pronunciation. However, the efficiency of imitation is constrained by other factors.