Voiceover acting has been adopted in English classrooms as an enjoyable activity to improve the speaking skill (Henrichsen, 2015, Talavan & Rodríguez-Arancón, 2019). Research of phonetic aspects of emotion reveal that pitch and voice quality change depending on different types of scene setting (e.g., different interlocutors with different emotions) in the voiceover activity (Belanger, et al., 2015). It is also reported that the pronunciation quality of EFL learners improved through voiceover activity. However, comparison of different instructional reinforcements has not been done widely. Thus, it is not clear which aspects of segmental and suprasegmental features improved through interventions. The purpose of this research is to investigate the effects of different pedagogic reinforcements of voiceover on the improvement of emotional prosody produced by Japanese learners of English. We are especially interested in identifying acoustic features of their emotional prosody of a dialog after they received a pedagogic reinforcement.
The participants in this study were 40 Japanese university students (CEFR A2 level). All the participants were provided a script of a scene of a quarrel between two cartoon characters (approximately 30 seconds), selected from a Disney movie "Shrek," and instructed to read their lines to the videoclip in a pair. They were divided into two groups according to their pedagogical reinforcements. One group of the students (Group 1) observed original intonation curves on Praat while receiving the instructions of timing of pitch rise and fall, and repeated and shadowed the sounds. The other group of the participants (Group 2) watched the video clip, receiving the instructions of articulations of consonants and vowels, and practiced synchronizing the character's gestures, paying attention to the shape of the cartoon's mouth, facial expressions and body movements. The training sessions lasted for five weeks, with a 15-minute training session each week. They were videotaped after the reinforcement.
Both segmental and suprasegmental features were analyzed. As segmental features, VOT and the length of consonants and vowels were measured while pitch range, intonation curve, speech rate of an utterance, and intensity were measured for the analysis. The expected results are that both groups improved their emotional prosody, but there is some tendency that Group1 outperformed Group 2 in pitch aspects while Group 2 outperformed Group 1 in aspects of segmental duration. Their introspection results will also be reported at the conference.
Reference
Belanger, T., Menezes, C., Barboa, C., Helo, M., & Shirazifard, K. (2015). The voice of love. Proceedings of the 18th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, Glasgow, UK: the University of Glasgow. Paper number 523.
Henrichsen, L. (2015). Video voiceovers for helpful, enjoyable pronunciation practice. In J. Levis, R. Mohammed, Z. Zhou, & M. Qian (Eds.), Proceedings of the 6th Pronunciation in Second Language Learning and Teaching Conference, University of California, Santa Barbara, Sept. 2014. (pp. 267-273), Ames, IA: Iowa State University.
Talavan, N. & Rodríguez-Arancón, P. (2018). Voice-over to improve oral production skills. In J. D. Sanderson & C. Botella- Tejera (Eds.), Focusing on audiovisual translation research (English edition)(pp. 211-236). Universitat de Valencia.
