# Fluency in spontaneous description versus story-reading: Learner performance and views

Xavier Martin-Rubió

► To cite this version:

Xavier Martin-Rubió. Fluency in spontaneous description versus story-reading: Learner performance and views. In A. Kirkova-Naskova, P. Humanez-Berral & A. Henderson, (Eds.). Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on English Pronunciation: Issues and Practices, Université Grenoble-Alpes, pp.43-54, 2025, 10.5281/zenodo.16695316. hal-05196478

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# Fluency in spontaneous description versus story-reading: Learner performance and views

Xavier Martin-Rubió

University of Lleida

## Abstract

One potentially effective way to get learners of an additional language to improve their pronunciation is to ask them to record themselves and reflect on their pronunciation outcomes. This pilot pedagogical study explores that approach in the context of a compulsory one-semester phonology course. The participants (N = 45) were first-year English majors of the English Studies degree at a Catalan university. They were asked to record themselves carrying out two different tasks as part of a compulsory phonology course: describing two images and reading a children's book aloud. Following these tasks, students carried out three activities designed to encourage reflection on their pronunciation: 1) analysing the main fluency measures, 2) selecting three segmental phenomena, and 3) focusing on prosody. The goal of these activities was to get them to reflect on the complexity of the concepts dealt with in the theoretical sessions by seeing the effects of carrying out two very different tasks. Whereas fluency in the first task very much depended on the students' language levels, other factors, such as their attitudes towards character voicing or pitch modulation, played a more prominent role in the second task.

**Keywords:** accent, fluency, pronunciation accuracy, prosody, story-reading

<figure><img src="image_2.png" /></figure>
# 1. Context and objectives

English Phonetics and Phonology is a course in the first semester of an English Studies bachelor's degree at University of Lleida, in Catalonia, Spain. The course is divided into two sections: the first deals with phonemes and allophones, while the second covers connected speech and intonation. Students record themselves engaging in different types of tasks, and then calculate the fluency measures of their productions, and analyse segmental and suprasegmental phenomena they may find relevant. In other words, students record themselves, and they then analyse and reflect on their oral productions. These students, despite having B2-C1 levels of proficiency, struggle with certain pronunciation aspects, such as pronouncing silent letters, or applying syllable-timed rather than stressed-time rhythm to connected speech.

In this pilot study, my goal was to use two different tasks so that students could see the task impact on fluency, pronunciation accuracy, and prosody. The aim was for them to see, that elements such as their speech rate, pausing, and prosody need to be adapted to meet the task function.

# 2. Research on task function and fluency

Fluency is seen as something positive to be attained when learning another language. A basic definition of fluency is: "the ability to talk with normal levels of continuity, rate and effort" (Starkweather, 1987, p. 12). When speech is constantly interrupted by pauses, continuity is affected; when only a small number of syllables are uttered in a given second, the speech rate is low; and when the speaker struggles to find the suitable word, listeners have to make an unusual amount of effort to understand. However, fluency is not just about speaking fast and pausing in the right places. Speed and pausing are task dependent and thus vary for the same speaker across tasks.

Concerning the relation between fluency and task function, Foster and Skehan (1996) compared spoken productions for a picture narrative, a personal information exchange, and a collaborative decision-making task. They found that the picture narrative contained more silence than the other two. Ejzenberg (2000) found that tasks that entailed interaction were less demanding than monologic tasks. In turn, Derwing et al. (2004) also compared three tasks (a picture narrative, a monologue, and a dialogue), and found that the perception of fluency was lower for the picture description task, explaining that: "the picture narrative imposed constraints that could not be avoided completely ... whereas the monologue and conversation tasks may have allowed [the participants] to rely on scaffolding and formulaic sequences and to have greater control of the content" (p. 671).

The perception of fluency is also influenced by prosody. For example, Derwing et al. (2004) found that prosodic factors varied little across tasks. Wennerstrom (2000) showed that prosody affects listeners' perceptions of L2 fluency when different speakers are compared, but not when different tasks are carried out by the same speakers. The results showed that L2 speakers who used a broad pitch range and who paused in syntactically appropriate places, such as clause boundaries, were rated by trained judges as more fluent than those with limited pitch range who tended to pause mid-phrase.

For this study, two types of tasks are compared: an image-description task and monologic story-reading. Although narratives typically contain more action, image descriptions also impose constraints, as the speaker needs to find the right words to describe what they are seeing, rather than reading words aloud from a page. In turn, reading a story differs greatly in several aspects. Even if the speaker has practised as much as they like and they are 'just' reading words aloud, they still have to differentiate the narrator from the characters, attach
emotions to the words read, and think of the audience, generally children, and how they
might enjoy the story the most.

**3. Methodology**

**3.1 Participants**

The initial pool consisted of 59 first-year students enrolled in the English Phonetics and Phonology course as part of the English Studies degree at a Catalan university during the 2023–2024 academic year. Forty-six of the students were female, whereas 13 were male, and all were B2-C1 level, as determined by the placement test which they complete at the start of their first academic year.

**3.2 Task types, materials and procedure**

Two production tasks were used. In the first task, students had to look at two images (see Appendix) for at least one minute and then audio-record themselves describing the two images. For the second task, students were instructed to read a specific children's book aloud: "Stick Man" Donaldson, 2008). This kind of book has proven beneficial to teach children new vocabulary (Read, 2014). *Stick Man* is a rhyming book where each line contains four stressed syllables, and the last syllables of each pair of sentences rhyme. The first six lines, for example, end in the following rhymes: *tree /tri:/* and *three /θri:/*, *jog /dʒɒg/* and *dog /dɒg/, *stick /strɪk/* and *trick /trɪk/. In our context the rhymes may help students notice the standard pronunciation of words with opaque spelling, for instance *choir* which rhymes with *fire*. The six lines presented below appear in the first four pages of the story, :

Line 1: *Stick Man* lives in the family tree | With his Stick Lady Love and their stick children three.

Line 2: One day he wakes early and goes for a jog. | *Stick Man*, *oh Stick Man*, *beware of the dog!*

Line 3: “A stick!” barks the dog. “An excellent stick! The right kind of stick for my favourite trick.

Line 4: “I’ll fetch it and drop it, and fetch it -- and then | “I’ll drop it and fetch it and drop it again.”

Line 5: “I’m not a stick! Why can’t you see, I’m Stick Man, *I’m Stick Man*,

Line 6: I’M STICK MAN, that’s me, And I want to go home to the family tree!”

In the lines, inverted commas are used to indicate a character other than the narrator. Stick Man is the main character, and his name is capitalised, as is his Stick Lady Love. Italics and an exclamation mark are used to indicate that the narrator is warning Stick Man of different dangers he will be facing. The first to speak is the dog (lines 3 and 4), followed by Stick Man himself (lines 5 and 6). The dog has confused Stick Man with an average stick, so Stick Man, after clarifying he is not a normal stick, says “I’m Stick Man” three times: the text appears in italics the second time, and in upper case the third time. The dog uses an exclamation mark to indicate how happy he is to have found a stick, and Stick Man uses it to indicate how desperate he is to go back home.

The students could rehearse as many times as they wanted. They could also plan, for example, whether they would make voices for the characters in the story, and how they would interpret the use of italics or upper case in the text. Students were asked to submit two audio
files: the one corresponding to the first time they had read the story aloud, and the final version, i.e., the one they were most satisfied with.

These tasks were not assessed, but students had to do them in order to get a mark for three assessed 'activities' in which they analyse their productions from the two tasks. Activity 1 consisted of calculating fluency measures, comparing these measures, and recording an audio analysis of the two sets of results. Activity 2 focused on segmental phenomena in the oral productions of the students. They had to identify and analyse three vocalic and three consonantal phenomena, thinking in terms of pronunciation accuracy and accent variation. Finally, Activity 3 concerned prosody, specifically pitch range.

The two production tasks differed in purpose and degree of spontaneity. For the image description, the limited time students had (1 minute) to prepare what they were about to say meant the degree of spontaneity was expected to be high. In terms of function, the purpose was that the listener could imagine what the images contained. In other words, informational content was the most important component in the text. In contrast, in the final version of the second task spontaneity is supposed to be very limited, as students are all reading aloud the same written text. However, the fact that there are several characters in the story means that students must still choose what to do with this diversity. In terms of function, students were told they had to appeal to their potential audience, i.e., children listening to their rendering of the story. Therefore, entertainment rather than the exchange of information was the main goal.

## 3.3 Calculating fluency measures

The students followed a procedure explained on a website created by the author<fnref n="1" /> in order to calculate the fluency measures of their recordings. They were required to identify three types of chunks in the audio file: silent pauses (of 0.25 seconds or longer), filled pauses (of any length), and bp-units (i.e., between-pauses units, traditionally referred to as runs). They entered the following information into a spreadsheet: the type of chunk, the length of the chunk in milliseconds, and in the case of bp-units, the number of syllables. Then, they calculated the following fluency measures (adapted from Ginther et al., 2010):

* The speed or Speech Rate of the bp-unit (i.e., the number of syllables produced per second) is calculated by dividing the number of syllables by time lengths.

* Speed of production can be calculated in two ways. One way is to calculate the Articulation Rate (AR) per bp-unit (i.e., to add up all bp-unit rates and divide the sum by the total number of bp-units). Another way is to calculate the Rate of Speech Time (ROST); this involves adding up the total number of syllables and dividing it by the speech time (which results from adding the time lengths of all the bp-units). While the first measure is the average rate of all the bp-units, the second provides the overall rate, as if the whole description was a single unit. The two measures render similar rates, which helps students to check they have calculated the rate correctly.

* The Mean Syllables per Run (MSR) is calculated by dividing the total number of syllables by the total number of runs (or bp-units).

* The Speech Time Ratio (STR) is calculated by determining the percentage of the time the student is producing syllables rather than pausing (i.e., Speech Time is multiplied by 100 and divided by the Total Response Time).

<footnote n="1">¹ Xavier Martin-Rubió, https://fmart37.wixsite.com/fluency-accuracy</footnote>
# 4. Results

## 4.1 Fluency and task type

The activities were assessed using the following rubric: spontaneity and length of their oral production (3 points), correctness of the fluency measures (4 points), and clarity and accuracy of their audio analysis of their work (4 points). Of the 45 recordings submitted, 23 were discarded from this study because for these students the accuracy of their fluency measures (item 2) was assessed at less than 3 points. Only the fluency measures which were at least relatively correct (at least 3 out of 4 points) will be analysed here.

The results are presented in Table 1 with the MSR, ROST and STR for task 1 (T1), task 2 (T2), and a section (only the opening four pages) of task 2 (T2s), ordered from the lowest MSR for task 1 to the highest. The 22 students have been assigned a code. The last row includes the average of the measures, and measures above the average in each column are boldfaced. The validity of each student's measures for T1 (i.e., image description) and for T2s

<caption>**Table 1**</caption>

*Students' MSR, ROST, STR and Number of Syllables*

<table><thead><tr><th rowspan="2">Student code</th><th colspan="3">MSR</th><th colspan="3">ROST</th><th colspan="3">STR</th><th colspan="3">Nº of syllables</th></tr><tr><th>T1</th><th>T2</th><th>T2s</th><th>T1</th><th>T2</th><th>T2s</th><th>T1</th><th>T2</th><th>T2s</th><th>T1</th><th>T2</th><th>T2s</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>S13</td><td>5.05</td><td>5.23</td><td>4.83</td><td>2.93</td><td>3.08</td><td>3.64</td><td>61.22</td><td>70.53</td><td>66.95</td><td>313</td><td>842</td><td>116</td></tr><tr><td>S07</td><td>5.65</td><td>5.62</td><td>6.44</td><td>3.03</td><td>3.40</td><td>3.78</td><td>71.99</td><td>66.15</td><td>72.45</td><td>226</td><td>820</td><td>116</td></tr><tr><td>S11</td><td>6.80</td><td>5.45</td><td>6.16</td><td>3.67</td><td>3.02</td><td>3.43</td><td>73.88</td><td>68.67</td><td>71.75</td><td><strong>415</strong></td><td><strong>856</strong></td><td>117</td></tr><tr><td>S06</td><td>6.97</td><td>6.03</td><td>6.80</td><td><strong>3.98</strong></td><td>3.69</td><td>3.73</td><td>59.24</td><td>68.61</td><td>70.30</td><td>209</td><td>825</td><td>117</td></tr><tr><td>S18</td><td>6.97</td><td><strong>9.93</strong></td><td><strong>8.14</strong></td><td>3.31</td><td><strong>3.90</strong></td><td><strong>4.11</strong></td><td>63.70</td><td><strong>76.28</strong></td><td>76.33</td><td>244</td><td>844</td><td>114</td></tr><tr><td>S02</td><td>7.00</td><td>6.52</td><td>7.80</td><td><strong>4.30</strong></td><td><strong>4.21</strong></td><td><strong>4.34</strong></td><td>64.34</td><td>64.04</td><td>73.44</td><td>364</td><td>848</td><td>117</td></tr><tr><td>S05</td><td>7.22</td><td>5.97</td><td><strong>8.36</strong></td><td>3.25</td><td>2.78</td><td>3.12</td><td>70.91</td><td><strong>74.92</strong></td><td><strong>78.17</strong></td><td><strong>426</strong></td><td>848</td><td>117</td></tr><tr><td>S15</td><td>7.98</td><td><strong>8.19</strong></td><td><strong>8.29</strong></td><td><strong>4.11</strong></td><td><strong>3.96</strong></td><td><strong>4.17</strong></td><td><strong>78.56</strong></td><td><strong>81.00</strong></td><td><strong>84.47</strong></td><td><strong>511</strong></td><td>835</td><td>116</td></tr><tr><td>S19</td><td>8.40</td><td><strong>7.66</strong></td><td><strong>9.62</strong></td><td>3.55</td><td><strong>3.83</strong></td><td><strong>4.09</strong></td><td>73.75</td><td><strong>74.29</strong></td><td><strong>83.95</strong></td><td><strong>403</strong></td><td><strong>858</strong></td><td><strong>125</strong></td></tr><tr><td>S01</td><td>8.54</td><td>7.04</td><td>7.19</td><td><strong>3.95</strong></td><td><strong>3.83</strong></td><td><strong>4.09</strong></td><td>74.84</td><td>71.85</td><td>74.80</td><td><strong>504</strong></td><td>845</td><td>115</td></tr><tr><td>S20</td><td>9.01</td><td><strong>9.96</strong></td><td>6.94</td><td>3.26</td><td>3.02</td><td>3.89</td><td><strong>76.69</strong></td><td><strong>80.48</strong></td><td><strong>82.64</strong></td><td><strong>626</strong></td><td>820</td><td>118</td></tr><tr><td>S09</td><td><strong>9.53</strong></td><td>6.82</td><td><strong>8.93</strong></td><td><strong>4.10</strong></td><td><strong>3.89</strong></td><td>3.79</td><td>74.64</td><td>61.27</td><td>72.64</td><td><strong>410</strong></td><td><strong>914</strong></td><td><strong>125</strong></td></tr><tr><td>S17</td><td><strong>10.06</strong></td><td>5.29</td><td>7.25</td><td>3.73</td><td><strong>4.20</strong></td><td><strong>4.17</strong></td><td><strong>81.31</strong></td><td>65.58</td><td>75.43</td><td><strong>694</strong></td><td>852</td><td>116</td></tr><tr><td>S08</td><td><strong>10.26</strong></td><td><strong>8.80</strong></td><td><strong>11.50</strong></td><td>3.32</td><td><strong>3.90</strong></td><td><strong>4.17</strong></td><td><strong>81.34</strong></td><td><strong>83.68</strong></td><td><strong>83.22</strong></td><td>277</td><td>845</td><td>115</td></tr><tr><td>S10</td><td><strong>10.84</strong></td><td><strong>7.44</strong></td><td>7.59</td><td><strong>4.28</strong></td><td><strong>4.49</strong></td><td><strong>4.21</strong></td><td><strong>83.27</strong></td><td>72.75</td><td>76.35</td><td><strong>423</strong></td><td><strong>925</strong></td><td><strong>129</strong></td></tr><tr><td>S21</td><td><strong>11.13</strong></td><td><strong>8.28</strong></td><td><strong>8.29</strong></td><td>3.60</td><td>3.66</td><td><strong>3.96</strong></td><td><strong>84.94</strong></td><td><strong>77.17</strong></td><td><strong>80.19</strong></td><td>356</td><td>853</td><td>116</td></tr><tr><td>S22</td><td><strong>11.18</strong></td><td><strong>8.43</strong></td><td><strong>12.89</strong></td><td><strong>4.26</strong></td><td><strong>4.15</strong></td><td><strong>4.71</strong></td><td><strong>81.48</strong></td><td><strong>78.64</strong></td><td><strong>85.40</strong></td><td><strong>425</strong></td><td>835</td><td>116</td></tr><tr><td>S12</td><td><strong>11.22</strong></td><td>6.78</td><td>5.41</td><td><strong>3.86</strong></td><td>2.94</td><td>2.87</td><td><strong>80.15</strong></td><td><strong>76.72</strong></td><td><strong>78.43</strong></td><td>303</td><td><strong>875</strong></td><td><strong>119</strong></td></tr><tr><td>S16</td><td><strong>12.53</strong></td><td><strong>8.11</strong></td><td><strong>9.08</strong></td><td><strong>4.06</strong></td><td>3.52</td><td>3.63</td><td><strong>78.53</strong></td><td><strong>81.24</strong></td><td><strong>83.42</strong></td><td><strong>426</strong></td><td>852</td><td>118</td></tr><tr><td>S04</td><td><strong>13.37</strong></td><td>6.00</td><td>6.72</td><td><strong>4.53</strong></td><td><strong>4.10</strong></td><td><strong>4.48</strong></td><td><strong>84.81</strong></td><td>68.07</td><td>73.62</td><td><strong>401</strong></td><td>846</td><td><strong>121</strong></td></tr><tr><td>S14</td><td><strong>13.54</strong></td><td><strong>9.74</strong></td><td><strong>10.55</strong></td><td><strong>4.60</strong></td><td><strong>4.33</strong></td><td><strong>4.36</strong></td><td><strong>83.40</strong></td><td><strong>80.28</strong></td><td><strong>80.90</strong></td><td>325</td><td><strong>886</strong></td><td>116</td></tr><tr><td>S03</td><td><strong>13.96</strong></td><td><strong>7.30</strong></td><td>7.56</td><td><strong>4.24</strong></td><td><strong>3.85</strong></td><td>3.89</td><td><strong>83.88</strong></td><td><strong>74.36</strong></td><td><strong>81.07</strong></td><td><strong>391</strong></td><td><strong>913</strong></td><td><strong>121</strong></td></tr><tr><td>M</td><td>9.42</td><td>7.30</td><td>8.02</td><td>3.81</td><td>3.72</td><td>3.94</td><td>75.77</td><td>73.48</td><td>77.50</td><td>380</td><td>856</td><td>118</td></tr></tbody></table>

*Note.* Results are ordered from the lowest MSR for task 1 to the highest. Figures above the average in each column are typed in bold. The last row shows students' mean (M) scores per measure (T1, T2, T2s).
(i.e., the first four pages of the story) was manually checked by the author.<fnref n="2" /> The measures for reading aloud the start of the story (T2s) were deemed a sufficiently representative sample of how each student measured it for the rest of the story, and thus the accuracy of measures was not verified or assessed for the rest of the story (T2).

Two initial conclusions can be drawn from the results. First, students have quite different fluency levels, and second, students approach the tasks differently. Students S12, S14 or S22 produce more than 10 syllables between pauses on average in T1, whereas S07 or S13 produce fewer than 6 syllables between pauses. S22 produces 8.43 syllables in T2, whereas S12's result for T2 is quite different, with an MSR of 6.78 syllables. Both students show great fluency in the spontaneous task, but while S22 does not change the style for the story-reading task, S12 makes voices and pauses within text lines for dramatic effect, which might be the reason why the result shows a low MSR for T2. This difference is even more remarkable at the start of T2 – in the first four pages, the MSR's difference between S12 and S22 is 7.48 syllables (5.41 for S12 and 12.89 for S22).

There is also great diversity in the total number of syllables produced for the image description task. The two images for the description were chosen so that students had numerous elements to comment on, and as discussed above, item 1 of the rubric rewarded the spontaneity as well as the length of the student's production. The recommendation was to produce descriptions lasting between 2–5 minutes, and some students seem to have decided to limit the description to two minutes, whereas others described it in greater detail over a longer stretch of time.

Also noteworthy is the different number of syllables for T2, given that all students were reading the same text. In the opening pages of the story, there is a 15-syllable gap resulting from the different pronunciation of words like *family* (produced with two or three syllables), or *Stick Man* (with two or three syllables); in the latter case, 3 syllables were produced by adding a vowel before the initial /s/. In the whole story, there is a difference of 105 syllables between the student who read the text using the smallest number of syllables and the one producing it with the greatest number of syllables.

Figure 1 presents changes in the syllable count across bp-units for each of the 22 students, from the 6 lines recorded in T2s. It reflects how different strategies were adopted for reading

<caption>Figure 1</caption>

*Syllable count in T2s: Bp-Units (x-axis) and Syllables (y-axis)*

<figure><img src="image_3.png" /></figure>

<footnote n="2">² The author/researcher is also the study participants' teacher.</footnote>
the story: the flatter lines represent those who paused more often, and the steeper lines represent those who read entire lines without pausing.

## 4.2 Fluency and prosody of story-reading

The impact of fluency and prosody in story-reading can be illustrated by comparing two students with opposite approaches to the task. S12 and S22 had very similar MSRs for T1 (11.18 and 11.22 respectively), but their approach to T2 was different in many respects. In terms of the number of syllables, S22 produces the canonical 116 syllables, whereas S12 produced 119. S12 mistakenly said *be aware* (which adds one syllable) rather than *beware*, adds *ah* (one more syllable) before the second *I'll drop it* that is not in the text, and does not use the contraction *I'm* the third time Stick Man tells us who he is, i.e., *I AM STICK MAN*, which has one more syllable than *I'M STICK MAN*.

More detail for this comparison is provided in Table 2, where numbers in brackets indicate the rounded lengths (in milliseconds) of the pauses. S12 pauses 13 more times than S22, with a total length of pausing of 12.5 seconds for S12 and just 4.2 seconds for S22. S22 reads the first two lines without pausing, whereas S12 pauses three times. The same happens when the dog starts talking; S22 delivers the first two lines by the dog without pauses, whereas S12 pauses three times.

<caption>**Table 2**</caption>

*The Two Renderings of the First Four Pages by S12 and S22*

<table><thead><tr><th>S12</th><th>S22</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>Stick Man (<strong>0.5</strong>) lives in the family tree (<strong>0.8</strong>) with his Stick Lady Love (<strong>0.5</strong>) and their stick children three (<strong>1.2</strong>) one day (<strong>0.4</strong>) he wakes early and goes for a jog (<strong>0.8</strong>) Stick Man (<strong>0.4</strong>) oh Stick Man (<strong>1.0</strong>) be aware of the dog (<strong>1.0</strong>) a stick (<strong>0.9</strong>) barks the dog an excellent stick (<strong>0.6</strong>) the right kind of stick (<strong>0.3</strong>) for my favourite trick (<strong>0.7</strong>) I'll fetch it (<strong>0.5</strong>) and drop it (<strong>0.4</strong>) and fetch it (<strong>0.3</strong>) and then ah I'll drop it and fetch it and drop it again (<strong>0.8</strong>) I'm not a stick (<strong>0.3</strong>) why can't you see I'm Stick Man (<strong>0.4</strong>) I'm Stick Man (<strong>0.3</strong>) I am Stick Man that's me (<strong>0.4</strong>) and I want to go home to the family tree</td><td>Stick Man lives in the family tree with his Stick Lady Love and their stick children three (<strong>0.7</strong>) one day he wakes early (<strong>0.3</strong>) and goes for a jog (<strong>0.4</strong>) Stick Man oh Stick Man beware of the dog (<strong>0.8</strong>) a stick barks the dog an excellent stick the right kind of stick for my favourite trick (<strong>0.3</strong>) I'll fetch it and drop it and fetch it and then (<strong>0.3</strong>) I'll drop it and fetch it and drop it again (<strong>1.1</strong>) I'm not a stick why can't you see I'm Stick Man I'm Stick Man I'm Stick Man that's me (<strong>0.3</strong>) and I want to go home to the family tree</td></tr></tbody></table>

*Note.* Numbers in brackets indicate the rounded lengths (in milliseconds) of pauses.

S12 and S22 also had to decide whether to individualise the voices of the narrator, the dog and Stick Man, and how to convey the emotions of these characters as represented by exclamation marks. S12 decided to vary the voices. For example, the voice of her dog had a
different quality (lower pitch) from the other two voices, and she used a very wide pitch range (see Figure 2, blue line right). In contrast, S22 did not change voice quality and her pitch range remained unaltered (see Figure 2, blue line left).

<caption>Figure 2</caption>

S22's Dog (left) and S12's Dog (right)

<figure><img src="image_4.png" /></figure>

Regarding productions for Stick Man, the contrast is even greater as shown in Figure 3. S12 adopted a low-pitched voice and decided to translate the italics and upper case into pitch variations. In the first rendering, S12 placed the tonic syllable on *Stick* and used a falling tone. For the text in italics she moved the stress to the word *Man* and used a fall-rise tone. For the upper-case version, she disregarded the contraction in the text and generated an extra syllable, and also used a fall-rise tone. Finally, in the last tone unit, she pronounced the tonic syllable *me* with a rise-fall tone (even though she wrote fall-rise (F/R) in her Praat image).

S22's version (see Figure 4) is a single tone unit in which the three times Stick Man shouts *I'm Stick Man* are read in exactly the same way, delivering all the syllables with no pauses for 0.25s or more (as shown in Table 2), and with the final falling tone on the tonic syllable *me*. Pitch variation is also minimal, compared to the productions of S12.

The Praat images presented here are from students' work, as they were taught how to use Praat to analyse the intonation of their own productions, using Tench's (2011) tripartite notion of intonation as tonality, tonicity, and tone. The analysis for Activity 2 was submitted as a text document with Praat images on the page. The analysis for Activity 3 was submitted in a video, in which they shared their screen, and used a PowerPoint presentation including Praat images and corresponding audio files. Overall, they did well to master these basics of Praat, despite inevitable errors (as in Figure 3).<fnref n="3" />

<footnote n="3">³ See Herment (2018, 2023) on the difficulty of using Praat with students.</footnote>
<caption>Figure 3</caption>

S12's Stick Man

<figure><img src="image_5.png" /><figcaption>Figure 4</figcaption></figure>

S22's Stick Man

<figure><img src="image_6.png" /></figure>
## 4.3 Student impressions of the tasks

In order to understand how students experienced the tasks, a short questionnaire was used before the end of the course. It was answered by 20 of the 22 students analysed for this study. To the question: "Did you make voices for the dog, the girl? If not, did you consider doing it and decided not to in the end? Or you just thought there was no need?", the answers were evenly split. Five tried to differentiate the characters somehow but considered what they had done did not amount to making voices as illustrated in the following comment: "I tried to change a little bit the intonation but I didn't make voices" (S15). Ten students answered they had indeed made voices, and five gave a negative answer. Of these five responses, two students felt it was not necessary, S22 being one of them. They gave the following reasons: "it was necessary but I decided not to do it" (S02), "didn't think to do it" (S14), and "because I did not like how they were turning out" (S19).

## 5. Discussion

This study presents the results of a teaching approach implemented in an undergraduate course. The approach focuses on using the differences between two tasks to make students reflect on the concepts of fluency, pronunciation accuracy, and prosody. The story-reading instructions allowed the students the freedom to choose whether they wanted to make voices or not, because not everyone would be comfortable making them; this freedom was suggested by a colleague who teaches optional, practical theatre workshops which these students can take for credit within the degree programme.

Given the results, including the answers to the questionnaire, I would like to replicate this pilot study, encouraging students more explicitly to try and differentiate the voices more and to play with the possibilities at hand. Students' questionnaire responses suggest that a good option may be to show students what people do when reading stories and to reflect on the impact these decisions have. For instance, some students make voices that sound very different from the narrator's, with extreme pitch variation, others make enough minor variations so that the listener can identify a new character has appeared, and some do nothing at all. In the first task, it is just a matter of providing information in a clear way, and speech rate and pausing should correspond to their proficiency level, whereas the second task is an entirely different endeavour and students should be aware of this. Those who do nothing at all sound monotonous and would probably not capture children's attention, and thus fail to fulfil the task's entertainment function. In addition, being able to widen one's pitch production and to realise that the intensity, pitch, and tonicity variations can impact on the audience's perception is of great importance for improving learners' overall speech performance. In other words, this story reading task could represent a golden opportunity for learners to experience success in playing with their voice, in changing, for example, their prosody and voice quality.

This study presents insights derived from a pedagogical approach to teaching about phonemes, fluency, connected speech, and intonation. On the one hand, it confirmed my intuition that fluency measures would change in the two tasks because, apart from the student's level, their approach to story-reading would translate into a different way of delivering syllables. On the other hand, it made me realise that some students simply see no need to vary pitch and differentiate characters, which might mean more work is needed to make them understand the relevance of pitch variation and character differentiation.
## 6. Conclusion

This pilot study presents an approach to teaching phonology in which students are asked to record themselves spontaneously describing images and reading a children’s book. For the spontaneous picture description task, the student’s proficiency level was a very important factor, something of which they were well aware. However, for the story-reading task, some participants seem to be unaware of what they need to do pronunciation-wise to make their speech more appealing. Providing learners with more opportunities to play with and grasp the importance of voice and pitch variations might raise their phonological awareness and further improve their L2 pronunciation.

## References

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Donaldson, J. (2008). *Stick Man*. Alison Green Books.

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Herment, S. (2023). From research to teaching: The case of English rising contours. In A. Henderson & A. Kirkova-Naskova (Eds.), *Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on English Pronunciation: Issues and Practices* (pp. 83–96). Université Grenoble-Alpes. https://hal.science/hal-04168829

Herment, S. (2018). Apprentissage et enseignement de la prosodie : l’importance de la visualization. *Revue française de linguistique appliquée, 23*(1), 73-88.

Read. K. (2014). Clues cue the smooze: Rhyme. pausing. and prediction help children learn new words from storybooks. *Frontiers in Psychology, 5*, 149. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00149

Starkweather, C. W. (1987). *Fluency and stuttering*. Prentice Hall.

Tench, P. (2011). *Transcribing the sound of English: A phonetics workbook for words and discourse*. Cambridge University Press.

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# Appendix

*The two images for the spontaneous description task*

<figure><img src="image_7.png" /><figcaption>Image B</figcaption></figure>

<figure><img src="image_8.png" /></figure>

## About the author

Xavier Martin-Rubió holds bachelor degrees in English Philology and in Audiovisual Communication from Universitat de Lleida, and a master's degree in European Studies from Maastricht Universiteit. He defended his doctoral dissertation in 2011. He worked as an English teacher in a high school, two official language academies and two private universities before moving back to Universitat de Lleida. He started working full-time at UdL in December 2014, where he is now an associate professor. He has been involved in several competitive projects as a member of CLA, and after a gap of several years, he is publishing again on the internationalization of and EMI in higher education, beliefs and emotions in additional language learning, and fluency and accuracy measurements across tasks.

Email: xavier.martinrubio@udl.cat