نبذة مختصرة : The purpose of this paper is to determine to what extent the elementary school lessons designed to teach accents actually lead to an improvement of students’ competencies in that domain. On the basis of insight into the very few existing previous studies on the matter, we have hypothesized that before formal accent training, students of the seventh and eighth grade of elementary school in Zagreb will not correctly pronounce the Standard Croatian tones, and that the teaching methods in this area will have a severely limited effect. The production of tones was recorded during the academic year 2017/2018 in a group of 34 students before and after accent training (as part of their regular class activities), which was followed by acoustic analysis and statistical processing. The results showed that before their accent lessons, the students correctly produced falling tones, but during the same phase they have systematically failed to produce rising tones. Even though the class activities have indeed positively contributed to the learning of short-rising and long-rising accents, this effect has been smaller than 10 %. The paper discusses various ways in which elementary school teaching methods can be improved so as to lead to better learning outcomes in the domain of Standard Croatian prosody
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