Combining Prosodic-Pragmatic Training and Free Commentary to Develop Intonation Skills in Italian FL: The Case of Information-Seeking Polar Questions

Prosodic skills are a fundamental component of language learning but are notoriously difficult to develop due the highly variable nature of prosody itself. In the burgeoning research field of didactic audiovisual translation, free commentary (FC) appears to be a less-studied modality of revoicing in the foreign language (FL) classroom. The main aim is to investigate the suitability of FC as a reinforcement activity for improving FL intonation skills. This paper presents an experimental study conducted at the University of Galway with undergraduate students studying Italian as a FL. The research design has a multi-stage structure. It consists of explicit prosodic-pragmatic training sessions, during which the experimental group learnt how to pronounce a polar question to ask for information, while the control group attended traditional conversation classes. A discourse completion task (DCT) was administered before and after the training. Secondly, both groups were required to complete FC to reinforce their intonation skills. Data analysis of DCT and FC was carried out within the autosegmental-metrical theoretical framework and the tone and break indices system. The results corroborate previous studies on the effectiveness of training and highlight the didactic value of FC in reinforcing FL intonation skills. The novelty of this study lies in the combination of the disciplines of prosody in FL acquisition, didactic audiovisual translation, and intonational phonology.