SOLER LIDIA ROSA
Congresos y reuniones científicas
Título:
Training in Reading Aloud as a Way of Enhancing Oral Communicative Competence in Academic and Scientific Contexts
Reunión:
Simposio; 10th Latin American, ESP Colloquium,; 2007
Resumen:

In academic and scientific contexts, reading aloud becomes an important component of oral communicative competence as it is a tool often used by scholars. As a tool for communication, effective reading aloud is seen as a process in which the reader aloud plays an essential role since he/she needs to transform a written text into a meaningful, easily-decoded oral message. From the phonological perspective, this transformation implies the use of prosodic features that organize the text and guide the listener in the process of recovering the intended meaning.

At the School of Languages, National University of Córdoba, prospective EFL professionals, receive phonological training during the first three years, the focus on the communicative value of reading aloud being in the third year of our five-year study programme. On the basis of data collected for a larger research project, this paper reports on only one aspect: how phonological training in reading aloud can help prospective teachers organize their readings in a more effective way. The reported results were obtained by comparing the phonological organization of two readings of the same text carried out by the same reader on two different occasions: before and after systematic training in reading aloud. The study was carried out considering the following prosodic features: prominence, tone, key, termination, pitch range and pause. As the phonological aspect is not a frequent object of research in EAP contexts, we hope this paper can begin to shed some light on this important component of oral communication.