| Summary: | While appropriate stress and rhythm is of importance for any speaker’s intelligibility, such properties are critical for international
teaching assistants (ITA), who deliver new and complex information to native speaker audiences. Given the limited time available
for ITA instruction and the need for a time-efficient rhythm teaching method, this article reports findings of a small-scale feasibility
study that tested the effectiveness of a synchronous speech component introduced into conventional rhythm instruction.
Synchronous speech involves teacher and learner speaking in unison continuously, which allows the L2 learner to learn rhythm
implicitly and uninterruptedly, and provides rich auditory-visual input, ample motor speech practice and real-time feedback,
thereby automatizing rhythm patterns. In a 6-week-long pre-post experimental feasibility study, blind listeners evaluated pretraining
and post-training recordings of ITA-produced speech. Data revealed a trend towards more improvement in L2 rhythm
working with the synchronous speech technique. Results establish feasibility in both instruction and research
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