Pages: 30-39

Abstract

This investigation intends to seek into investigating the effect of teaching the pronunciation through a fun activity of Rhythm on the learners’ pronunciation improvement. This study is to find out whether students in this group will perform a significant improvement in pronunciation comparing to the other group. Rhythm of English is considered as one of the biggest difficulties for many foreign learners of English. It is more important for EFL learners who have a very different system in their L1 (e.g. Persian). These learners are not usually motivated for pronunciation practice. Therefore, this study will explore the effect of musical rhythm, on pronunciation improvement. 120 Iranian EFL elementary learners in an English language institute aging from 7-9 years old will participate in this study. After the pretest they will be divided in two groups namely, control and experimental. In one group, teacher uses musical rhythm to teach as treatment of the study while in the other one, she does not. At the end of the term, a posttest will be given to both experimental groups to check any significant difference between their performances. “Rhythm, actually, is timing patterns among syllables. However, the timing patterns are not the same in all languages. There are two opposite types of rhythm in languages: stress-timed and syllable-timed. According to Mackay (1985), stress-timed rhythm is determined by stressed syllables, which occur at regular intervals of time, with an uneven and changing number of unstressed syllables between them; syllable-timed rhythm is based on the total number of syllables since each syllable takes approximately the same amount of time. English, with an alternation of stressed and unstressed syllables, is obviously stress-timed” (Chen, C. et al., 1996).