An Extracurricular Training Program to Develop Suprasegmental Features and Prosodic Competence in B1 EFL Learners

Resumen

The development of oral intelligibility is a fundamental aspect of English as a Foreign Language learning, especially for B1-level students who need to communicate clearly in academic and everyday situations. However, in many school contexts, pronunciation instruction tends to focus on individual sounds, grammar, and vocabulary, while suprasegmental features such as stress, rhythm, and intonation receive limited attention. This situation reduces students’ opportunities to develop clearer, more fluent, and more comprehensible oral production. The objective of this article is to propose a structured extracurricular training program to strengthen the prosodic competence of B1 EFL learners. The study follows an applied and proposal-based approach aimed at designing a pedagogical intervention that complements regular English classes. The proposal is organized into progressive phases, including awareness and diagnosis, development of word and sentence stress, rhythm and connected speech practice, use of intonation in communication, integration of suprasegmental features in communicative tasks, and formative assessment. It is concluded that an extracurricular program focused on prosody can provide systematic opportunities for oral practice and contribute to improving students’ intelligibility, confidence, and communicative competence.