Effects of Reading Aloud Using a Chant Method: A Comparison of Acoustic Analysis and Human Ears

Abstract

　　The purposes of this study are to investigate how a method of jazz chants can be used as pronunciation practice in Japanese adult EFL classes and to consider what element affects the intelligibility of Japanese EFL learners’ pronunciation by making a comparison between an acoustic analysis and a human ear evaluation. Acoustic data were extracted from a part of Kawai’s (2014) study. In the previous research, 52 participants, classified by their English proficiency level into three groups (high, middle, low), chanted from a text for approximately 15 minutes in their English classes for a period of five weeks. The ability to control the duration of the inter-stress interval (ISI) was used as a criterion for acquiring an English stress-timed rhythm. The present study used 20 participants’ (low English-proficiency group) acoustic data from the above, and two native English speakers evaluated these data using 9-point scale. According to two-way repeated measure ANOVA, the main effect for sentence type and time (pre-and post-test) were statistically significant. Moreover, the correlation between ISI’s duration and the raters’ scores were observed according to each correlation ratio and scatterplot.