Abstract
Intonation instruction has repeatedly proved a challenge for EFL teachers, who avoid getting involved in intonation teaching more than their EFL textbooks demand from them. Since a great number of teachers rely on EFL textbooks when implementing intonation practice, the intonation activities in EFL materials are often central to their classroom. Even though the research on intonation instruction has been well-documented, few papers have explored intonation activities in EFL materials. The present study thus provides an empirical analysis of intonation activities in five EFL student’s books series by exploring the overall coverage of intonation activities across the series and the quality of these activities. The results reveal that intonation activities are underrepresented in the EFL student’s books, and that discourse intonation deserves more attention in the activities. Considerations for EFL teachers and publishers are also discussed.
Highlights
In the main, intonation has been defined as the speech melody or sentence melody, “terms that focus on pitch variations and modulations” (Chun 2002, p. 3)
All of the activities were dedicated to practicing sentence intonation, for there was no mention or any use of discourse intonation activities
Some of the activities were followed by visual design indicating whether the sentence intonation either rises or falls, which was regarded extremely useful for the students
Summary
Intonation has been defined as the speech melody or sentence melody, “terms that focus on pitch variations and modulations” (Chun 2002, p. 3). Intonation has been defined as the speech melody or sentence melody, “terms that focus on pitch variations and modulations” In connected speech or natural discourse, different movements and contours characterize pitch (Toivonen, 2003). While the emphasis is what distinguishes the most prominent elements of an utterance, different pitch movements in tone units affect its grammaticality and linguistic information. There are general classifications of pitch movement categories related to syntactic structure, where “statements, wh-questions, commands, and exclamations traditionally are described as having falling intonational patterns and yes-no questions as having typically rising patterns”
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