Development of the prosodic competence in reading aloud: the importance of the pause

Abstract

During the last years, the interest towards the study of prosodic elements of the text (tone, pauses, etc.) has increased, and the necessity of working on these components of the oral communicative competence, in order to improve the comprehension of texts read aloud, is constantly stated. For the purpose of analyzing pauses as elements that structure the discourse, this research estimates the types of pause, identifies some aspects to pay attention to and, finally, specifies the influence of some variables, such as mother tongue, origin and gender, on pausing inside the indivisible structures. To study this, an experiment when 100 Basque bilingual students of University School of Teaching of the UPV/EHU, aged from 18 to 25 years old, were asked to read aloud a journalistic text, was held. The statistical data analysis proves that the most common type of pause used by the young readers is the silent pause, it also concludes that the pause position is incorrect on numerous occasions and that the mother tongue’s influence on it is rather significant.