The abstract of my project

Podcasting: a disruptive technique for improving teacher trainees’ ability
to make stress sentences properly.

This paper reports on a study carried out with twenty-six teacher trainees from the University of Tolima, in order to identify the effect of using Podcasting as a tool to improve the way they stress sentences. Participants were asked to record themselves reading aloud a piece of news. Then, the news —which has an audio recorded version read by a native speaker— was analyzed in terms of the suprasegmental features in it. After explicit explanations on aspects of connected speech such as linking, thought groups, content and structure words, students identified those features on the text, by highlighting the focus words, separating the thought groups using slant lines, and joining the words that were linked using curve lines.
Subsequently, students recorded the piece of news again and then peer-reviewed their partners work. I examined how the different stages along the implementation were perceived by students. The project intended to connect the concepts of Andragogy, podcasting, intelligibility, and sentences stress. The data were collected by means of a pre- and post test, surveys, artifacts, and logs.
The main categories that emerged out of data were the one below:
1. Self-confidence
2. Self-assessment
3. Professional development
4. Language awareness

Data analysis revealed that even though the improvement was not so significant, students perceived the project very positively since they find podcasting a very useful tool for them to self-assess their performance and to enrich their future praxis as teachers.
Further studies may seek to shed light on how suprasegmentals would be addressed in students not when reading but when speaking at the moment of create a non scripted-podcast.