การสร้างความตระหนักรู้ในการเปล่งเสียงระดับเสียงซ้อนในภาษาอังกฤษของนักเรียนไทย:กรณีศึกษานักศึกษาสาขาวิชาภาษาอังกฤษชั้นปีที่หนึ่ง มหาวิทยาลัยธุรกิจบัณฑิตย์

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This paper examined the extent to which the teaching of prosodic features improved the performance of nonnative speaker’s (NNS) speech. It also investigated the extent to which the improvements in learners’ speech had an impact on the increase in intelligibility and the decrease in the first language (L1) transfer effect in their performance. Thirty Thai students were drawn from a pool of 108 first-year English-major students in an English Phonetics course. Based on scores on three English pronunciation tests conducted earlier in the course, speech data of fifteen students who scored highest and fifteen students who scored lowest were selected and were placed in the High and Low groups. The students recorded their speech of 50 isolated words and an extended text before and after a three-week instruction of English prosodic features (i.e. word stress, sentence stress, rhythm, and intonation). The results revealed that both groups showed statistically significant improvement in their production of English prosody. The high group made most improvement in their performance on pausing, whereas the low group showed the highest degree of improvement in word stress on individual words. The data showed statistically significant increase in intelligibility and significant decrease of L1 transfer effect in the speech of the high-group students as a result of the training, but in the low group these results were not statistically significant. The information gained from the study suggests that although some prosodic features may be more challenging than others, it presents an argument in support of the possibility of incorporating prosody in EFL classes for intelligible pronunciation.

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