The effect of prosody instruction in developing listening comprehension skills by interpreter trainees: does methodology matter?

In the present study, three groups of interpreter trainees were formed, two experimental groups, i.e., blended prosody instruction (BPI) and computer-assisted prosody training (CAPT), and one control group (CON). In this experiment the participants took part in a four-week teaching program for 16 sessions (60 minutes per session), i.e., 16 hours in all. The participants were native Persian speakers who studied English interpreting at the BA level in Iran. The control group listened to authentic audio tracks or watched authentic English movies, discussed their contents, and did exercises based on these tasks for developing listening comprehension skills during the full 16 hours. The CAPT group spent one-third of the time (320 minutes) instead on prosody training using Accent Master Software. The BPI group did this for only 160 minutes but spent the other 160 minutes on theoretical explanations of prosody, and did practical exercises with prosodic structures supervised by an expert human instructor. Students then took a posttest in listening comprehension skills. The results revealed that the BPI group outperformed the other groups in developing listening comprehension skills. This conclusion may have pedagogical implications for interpreter training programs, foreign language instructors, and interpreting practitioners.Supplemental data for this article is available online at https://doi.org/10.1080/09588221.2021.1957942 .