Thanks to the ten participants and the three listener-judges, this pilot experiment was carried
out in good conditions. Despite some people’s constraints of time, every recording and rating
was completed well. Typical French-speaking non-English students participated.
Furthermore, the trainings of the experiment were redolent of typical pronunciation classes
in a secondary school or to non-specialists. That will help us draw more general conclusions
regarding L2 pronunciation teaching in France. As for the results, the experiment will enable
us to answer our main hypothesis, that is, whether having a training on English prosody has
a better effect on pronunciation skills – viz. read speech in the scope of this work – than
having a training on individual sounds.
As is pointed out in Flege, Bohn and Jang (1997: 451): “one can never be certain that the
listeners chosen for an intelligibility test adequately represent the variety (or varieties) of the
target language that one’s non-native subjects have heard and presumably learned to some
degree”. That is why, even though three judges did the rating task, it is unsafe to affirm that
their judgements are a hundred percent reliable to make more general and objective
conclusions about the importance of prosody. Nevertheless, using three different kinds of
people, who all know English pronunciation full well, whether theoretically or practically, is
an advantage. As a matter of fact, three different yet interesting points of view are given and
can be compared with one another. In this respect, the results of the experiment will be even
more reliable, and the mean scores will be more objective.