Teaching intonation of four English interrogative sentence types using audio-visual pitchtracks

Abstract

This study provides the result of an experiment to measure the effectiveness of teaching English intonation patterns to Korean college students. The experiment was done with four different types of interrogative sentences: structures ending with a grammatical word, questions with an imbedded sentence, either-or questions, and questions with an intermediate rise or fall. The subjects were explicitly taught using the tape recorder, visually overridden intonation marks, and computer-generated intonation contours. Eight subjects were selected from three different general English levels: high intermediate, low intermediate, and low, and they practiced 164 sentences in four different test lists. After the ten weeks of practice and teaching, the subjects showed a noticeable development in performance. The analysis is based on 36 sentences in the four different question types. The pretest from the subjects and previous general survey showed a very low performance (15-59%), but the posttest of the subjects showed a significantly improved production (63-96%). In the pretest, there were different production abilities among the subjects of different levels of English ability, but in the post-test, no such notable differences were found. The levels of difficulty or easiness were found among the four different interrogative structures. Close-choice (Either-Or) questions are the easiest to learn, questions with final grammatical words are the next, questions with an embedded sentence come next, and questions with a non-final rise or fall intonation are the most difficult.