Effects of Teaching Suprasegmentals on Second Language Learning and Motivation

Abstract

This study focuses on the effect of teaching one aspect of suprasegmental structure, sentence stress, on two factors: students’ motivation to learn the language and native speakers’ perception of the students’ speech. The experiment was carried out on a class of English language learners in a high school in Chile over the course of six weeks. The class was split into two groups, and each group was taught the same lessons, but one received explicit instruction about where sentence stress occurred when new phrases were taught. At the beginning and end of the study, students were given a survey measuring their motivation to learn English. Also, a panel of judges with varying exposure to Spanish evaluated recordings of two students from the test class and one from the control to determine how close the speakers sounded to native speakers. Statistical analysis showed that there was no significant difference between the motivation levels of the test class versus the control class. However, there was significantly more improvement between the pre and post recordings of the test class members than the recording of the control class student. Although it did not demonstrate a correlation between teaching sentence stress and motivation, this study reinforces the importance of teaching suprasegmental structure to second language learners.