According to Brumberg et al. (2018:2) “Linguistic prosody conveys many important aspects of speech including stress, rhythm, intonation, and phrase structure, as speakers alter fundamental frequency, pause length, word duration, and speech intensity.” Several studies have shown that prosody plays an important role in the intelligibility, comprehensibility and accentedness of non-native discourse (Munro & Derwing, 1995, 1998). However, prosody appears to be difficult to teach (Setter et al., 2010). When asked about prosody in France, both teachers and L2 learners say that a mixture of a lack of knowledge/confidence and a lack of suitable resources explain their reluctancy to undertake the task. It seems L2 learners find it hard to perceive pitch and those who do, struggle to map it out onto their own speech. Even native teachers, who use intonation naturally in everyday speech, shy away from teaching intonation. Something that should be intuitive (at least for native teachers), seems to leave most questioning themselves, unable to decide if what they just said (or perceived) corresponds to a fall or rise. From this premise arose the desire to try to find a solution. Is it possible to facilitate the learning process and increase teachability? Some previous studies dealing with prosody have used software such as Praat (Olson, 2014, Imber et al., 2017, Setter et al., 2010) but they seem too complicated for L2 learners to use them (Setter et al., 2005). Thus, began the search for a more suitable user-friendly tool. The activities, freely available online at Chrome Music Lab (see bibliography) are bright, colourful, and noisy. This site, originally created to visualize musical sounds, waves and notes, has a feature where it is possible to see 3D “spectrograms” in real time. The spectrogram is displayed in different colours ranging from blue (low intensity) to red (high intensity) therefore it is possible, for example, to visualise where the lexical stress is and the melodic pattern of an utterance. But is it too simple? Could it really help L2 learners improve their oral production?

1. Introduction

1.1. Research on prosody
1.2. Intonation
1.3. Lexical stress

2. L2 prosody
2.1. Common pronunciation difficulties for French learners of English

3. Research on visual and auditory tools

4. From conception to implementation
4.1. Searching for a corpus
4.1.2. Corpus
4.1.2.1. Part 1: Words
4.1.2.2. Part 2: intonation
4.2. Setting up the experiment
4.2.1. Participants
4.3. Dealing with results

5. Discussion
5.1. Conclusion and further directions
References