Pronunciation teaching in a workplace

The learners in this study are employees in the correctional system or in the education system to become a prison officer in Sweden. All are non-native speakers of Swedish who have completed studies in Swedish in the program Swedish for immigrants, with a need to improve their pronunciation in Swedish to be able to carry out tasks and communication in their work. This study focuses on the pronunciation instructions the participants received during a specific training program at the workplace wherein the aim was to achieve intelligible pronunciation and an improvement in speaker confidence in Swedish.

The training focused on Swedish prosody and was taught by a speech therapist with expertise in pronunciation. Each group consisted of a maximum of six learners with a variety of first languages. The groups each met twice a week over the span of five weeks with homework in between involving listening, analyzing and production tasks. These were followed up and discussed at the subsequent lesson. Recordings were made several times pre-, post- and during the training to document the students' progression of both read-aloud and spontaneous speech. Three speech therapists assessed the pre- and post-training program using a 7-grade Likert scale with a focus on prosody, speech tempo and intelligible speech.

The results show a significant progression in verbal communication in Swedish. Furthermore, in a post-training survey the learners report an improvement in their confidence to speak Swedish, development of strategies for communication and a better understanding of spoken Swedish.