Raising the Learners’ Awareness of Prosodic Features in Pronunciation and its Impact on Listening Comprehension: Insights from Noticing Hypothesis (Schmidt, 1995)

Listening instruction has always encountered various approaches, leading to learners’ success or failure in listening comprehension. Framed in Noticing Hypothesis (Schmidt, 1995), the present study attempts to investigate the effect of raising the learners’ awareness of prosodic features (stress, intonation, and rhythm) in the pronunciation of words on their listening comprehension. In doing so, 70 intermediate EFL learners from Kish Air Language Institute were selected. They were divided into one experimental group (n=35) and one control group (n=35). Oxford Placement Test (OPT) was administered to ensure the homogeneity of participants’ level of proficiency. The listening pre- and post-tests were also taken by the participants. Results showed that the experimental group outperformed the control group, implying that when learners were aware of prosodic features (stress, intonation, and rhythm) in the pronunciation of words, they could significantly improve their listening comprehension. It seems that teaching prosodic features can raise the learners’ pronunciation awareness, which can then improve the learners’ listening comprehension as learners can be familiarized with the structural and semantic categories of target words and activate their content knowledge of the key words in doing the listening tasks. Awareness raising of prosodic features can be in alignment with metacognitive instruction - while the former can be more productive - in order to help foreign language learners develop their listening comprehension in stress-free learning environment. Finally, it is noteworthy that learners’ awareness demands teachers’ awareness of how to teach, which can be fulfilled by purposeful teacher education programs.