The Effect of Explicit Teaching Paralinguistic Features On Iranian EFL Learners’ Per-formance in English Conversation in EFL Context (Published)
The aim was to investigate the extent explicit teaching of paralinguistic cues contributes to de-veloping EFL learners’ paralinguistic performance. 72 Persian natives ranging between the age of 16 to and 24 sat for FCE proficiency test. 64 intermediate candidates formed the sample which was randomly divided into four equal groups, three experimental groups and one con-trol group. Sitting for a pretest, the experimental groups received three types of treatments: on-ly audio-visually, only aurally, and combination of the previous treatments plus using cell phones for recording, recasting, repeating the voices as feedback, while the control group re-ceived the material conventionally. After ten weeks, they were administered a post-test. Two raters rated their oral performances on the pre- and post-tests. The inter-raters’ reliability indi-ces were (k=0.86, k=0.84), respectively. The statistical tests reveals significant differences in favor of all experimental groups (P<.005) particularly of group 3 which support the signifi-cance of the treatment.
Keywords: Effective communica-tion, Non-verbal competence, Paralinguistic features, Technological devices