Teaching Of Intonation Research Articles

An edusemiotic approach to teaching intonation in the context of English language teacher education

Abstract Employing manifold symbolic, iconic, and indexical signs – whether linguistic or extralinguistic – along with their polysemic and multimodular features, edusemiotics is an integrative and interdisciplinary conceptual framework that surmounts learning processes where learners find significance and meaning under the assumed responsibility of English language teachers for the provision of such a participative environment. Allowing for the salience of intonation despite its intricate nature, thus its inevitable underrepresentation in course books and teaching practices, this article intends to propose a novel means of intonation instruction as well as its components (i.e., stress, pitch, and juncture) for English language teacher education (henceforth ELTE) contexts within the edusemiotic framework. Promoting the importance of edusemiotic teaching of intonation, this article further aims to add to our understanding of how signs and sign systems can be benefitted in ELTE settings and their potential exploitation across various other disciplines. It concludes with suggestions for future research on more practical aspects of edusemiotic tools and learner and teacher attitudes toward integrating them within the teaching program.

Research on Phonics and Vocabulary Teaching in English Classroom of Rural Primary Schools

The first step in language learning is to learn how to pronounce, and pronunciation is not only the starting content of language learning, but also the cornerstone of language learning. This article takes English pronunciation teaching in rural primary schools as the starting point to explore and analyze the current teaching methods of pronunciation taught by rural primary school teachers, and proposes some feasible suggestions from the current education perspective. And in this process, the teaching methods of English vocabulary were mentioned. By combining different researchers' explanations of the teaching methods of English vocabulary, better vocabulary teaching methods were obtained in the later stage, allowing students to learn knowledge happily. In response to the current situation of rural primary school teaching, some suggestions are also proposed, such as strengthening the horizontal and vertical infiltration of pronunciation and intonation teaching content in pronunciation teaching, and paying attention to the comprehensive development of pronunciation; And in vocabulary teaching, teachers need to create a vocabulary teaching context and encourage students to comprehensively use vocabulary.

Research on College English Intonation Teaching from the Perspective of Prosodic Phonology

Research on College English Intonation Teaching from the Perspective of Prosodic Phonology

STUDENTS' PERCEPTION OF THE INFLUENCE OF INTONATION IN ENGLISH ON CONVEYING THE MEANING OF SPEECH IN COMMUNICATION

In communication, intonation plays an important role in conveying the meaning of a speech. In this article, we study students' perception of the influence of intonation in conveying the meaning of speech in communication to propose solutions to help students overcome intonation errors when communicating, as well as, help teachers have appropriate intonation teaching methods. Our data and analysis are based on research documents, surveys, and in-depth interviews with students. According to the study results, most students are well aware of the importance of intonation and of the factors affecting intonation, and they are also aware of the causes of intonation errors. However, students do not apply their knowledge of intonation to speech, they stop at the cognitive level. The study indicates that students often make intonation mistakes in Tag-question, Wh-question, and Imperative sentence in communication.<p> </p><p><strong> Article visualizations:</strong></p><p><img src="/-counters-/edu_01/0256/a.php" alt="Hit counter" /></p>

An Analysis of Prosodic Features of Chinese EFL Majors’ English Questions

Drawing on the Auto-segmental Metrical theory in intonational phonology, this paper reveals the phonological structure of English interrogatives between Chinese EFL majors and native speakers from a syntactic pragmatic perspective, based on reading documents of eight English majors with Praat being its research tool. Findings show that the prosodic characteristics of interrogatives of English majors are obviously different from those of native speakers, which are mainly reflected in the segmentation of tone groups, boundary tone, intonation nucleus, and stress distribution. It purports to help English majors clarify the important pragmatic functions of intonation in information transmission and interpersonal communication, and foster strengths and circumvent weaknesses so as to better develop "Chinglish pronunciation" with Chinese characteristics; meanwhile, to bring enlightenment to English intonation teaching.

TEACHING EMOTIONAL ENGLISH INTONATION

This experimental research focuses on teaching emotional English intonation with video at university as this issue is not presented in scientific literature. The article aims to show a practical approach to teaching English intonation with ICT tools confirmed experimentally and in practice while conducting an English Phonetics course at university. The article is based on the author’s dissertation «Teaching emotional intonation with video (2-nd year students at Linguistic University)» (2009). Reaviling linguistic and psychological features of emotional intonation the article shows that emotional intonation teaching is a complex phenomenon including a system of interdependent features – linguistic, paralinguistic and extralinguistic. This approach to teaching intonation provides equal conditions for students with the visual and auditory types of speech information perception to perceive and recognise emotional intonation patterns in communication. Educational video courses are considered beneficial to demonstrate verbal and non-verbal features of emotional intonation in a communicative environment. Besides, the article presents step-by-step teaching of emotional intonation based on carefully designed exercises: pre-communicative (receptive: recognition, differentiation and reproductive: imitation, imitation with a key, substitution, transformation, sounding) and communicative (productive: sounding and dramatisation); paused and synchronous. The examples of exercises with detailed descriptions of activities are displayed as well. Furthermore, a model of teaching emotional intonation shows stages of using video and performing communicative activities. After experimental learning, all 60 (100%) students achieved proficiency levels, primarily «proficient», and «advanced». The research has demonstrated that the proposed method of training can result in better recognition and more accurate production of emotional intonation in speaking.

Describing, listening and teaching questions and orders´ intonation in mexican, caribbean and castilian spanish to brazilian learners

The study intends to present results obtained from a methodology of intonation teaching, based on metacognition assumptions (Flavell, 1976; Gombert, 1992; Ribeiro, 2003). The methodology has five stages labelled as: 1 - learner's awareness of the transfering their mother tongue (LM) into the target foreign language (LEA); 2 - description of the intonational contour of total and partial interrogative utterances; 3-perception; 4-mimetic repetition; 5 - oral production based on careful listening. According to Cortés (2002), intonation is essential to convey messages in an appropriate way, showing an expressive meaning - besides syntactic-semantic aspects- and the meaning of the utterances. According to PINTO (2009), the E / LE learner transfers the intonational pattern of the LM when he or she in he/her LEA. How to teach intonation? This author proposed and applied a methodology of describing and teaching Spanish intonation to undergraduate students of Letras - Portuguese / Spanish, from a public university in Rio de Janeiro. For this study, 18 utterances were written in Spanish as a foreign language, based on the Interactive Atlas of the Spanish intonation. The corpus is composed of 9 utterances in Brazilian Portuguese as L1, both compared to 9 utterances in Spanish as L1, totaling 36 statements. For such data collection, the informants received CD's composed of yes/no questions, confirmatory questions and declarative imperatives of request in the dialect chosen by each student- the Castilian, the Caribbean and the Mexican. Recordings were made at two specific moments: before and after exposure to our methodology of description and intonation teaching. After teaching, we described the utterances phonetically and analyzed them with the aid of PRAAT software and following the Autosegmental Metric (AM) model. After this analysis, we compared the implementation of F0 and the tonal accent of these utterances, in order to check if the learner's accomplishment of the prosodic system undergoes alteration after the work of awareness, description, perception, mimetic repetition and production stuck in attention. We observed in our results that learners, before being submitted to our methodological proposal of intonation description and teaching, transfer characteristic of Brazilian Portuguese contours into the production of Spanish as a foreign language for all listed varieties. This fact confirmed the transfer process. However, when learners are submitted to our methodological proposal, they mostly implement the expected outlines according to the chosen varieties.

Data-Driven Intonation Teaching An Overview and New Perspectives

Studies on the teaching of intonation are not new. They have actually represented an area of interest since the beginning of the 20th century (Jones 1909; Palmer 1922) up to the latest works by authors following different approaches such as Wells (2006), Canepari (2008), Busà (2012). More recently, there has been growing interest in computer assisted learning (Chun 1998, 2013) and applications in commercial products (Cazade 1999). In this contribution we provide a preliminary study which considers the degree of correlation between the intonation curves of L2 English learners and English native speakers in order to explore variation and to evaluate the potential proximity between different samples. The ultimate goal is to test a set of techniques designed to optimise a computer assisted program for second language intonation learning which have been developed for prosodic variation assessment (Cauvin 2017, De Iacovo 2019).

The acquisition of question intonation by Vietnamese learners of English

This paper examines the intonation of English statements and questions produced by Vietnamese speakers at two differing levels of proficiency. The goal of the study is three-fold: (1) analysing the final tunes and the prosodic structure observed in information-seeking questions, namely Yes-No question, Or-question, Tag-question and Wh-question, (2) evaluating which characteristics of the L2 English intonation can be clearly derived from the observation of the data, and (3) whether the L2 English intonation patterns are transferred from Vietnamese. A data set of 25 sentences that included 5 statements and 20 information-seeking questions were constructed. Ten native Australian English speakers as a control group and 20 Southern Vietnamese speakers of English (10 beginners and 10 advanced speakers) were recorded. The final tunes (the direction of the final F0 contours) of the sentences were analysed. The result showed that while the advanced speakers of English mostly produced intonation patterns that are typically used by native English speakers, beginning speakers of English used a variety of tunes, several of which are deviate from the native-like standard and clearly transferred from the tone contours in Vietnamese. The findings of this study have an original and significant contribution to the literature because it investigated into the prosodic transfer of intonation patterns between two typologically distinct languages: English, a stress accent language and Vietnamese, a contrastive contour tone language and has implications for intonation teaching.

The teaching and learning of L2 English intonation in a distance education environment: TL_ToBI vs. the traditional models

The teaching of intonation to learners of a second language (L2) tends to be an arduous and often neglected task even in specialized phonetic classes. This difficulty generally increases in a distance learning environment where students have to approach prosodic issues in an autonomous way. This paper tests the advantages and disadvantages of using a new model to teach English intonation to Spanish speakers in a self-tuition context, called TL_ToBI (Teaching and Learning ToBI), and compares the benefits of this proposal with the traditional methodologies. Two groups of Spanish students of English phonetics in a distance learning environment took part in this study. Each group was trained with a different methodology: 1) the British School of intonation and 2) TL_ToBI, which involves an adaptation of the ToBI conventions for teaching purposes. The intonation of four sentence types was assessed: declarative, yes-no question, wh-question, and imperative, produced both with neutral and marked readings. The results showed that those speakers trained with TL_ToBI produced more native-like intonation patterns than those instructed with the other model. These findings suggest that a system based on tonal targets and their association to the metrical structure has more benefits for the acquisition of the L2 prosody in a distance learning setting.

Validating David Brazil's Theory of Discourse Intonation for Intonation Teaching.

Validating David Brazil's Theory of Discourse Intonation for Intonation Teaching.

How to teach intonation to EFL students: A focus on communicative teaching methods

The purpose of this article is to provide an account on how to teach pronunciation to EFL learners, with a special focus on intonation as combined with requests. The intention of this study is to stimulate teachers to offer a focus on pronunciation in their classrooms and thus integrate them in the syllabus. Throughout this study, intonation is considered not as a luxury but as a necessity for an efficient interchange in English. It also aims at highlighting the importance of second language acquisition as ‘skill learning’. Concepts such as communication, comprehensible input, noticing and interaction are deeply addressed through this piece of work since they need to be taken into account when dealing with acquiring the language. This research provides a framework of English intonation highlighting the most salient concepts in the field. Firstly, the paper gathers and reviews some of the most outstanding insights from second language acquisition, linguistics and communication. Then, it presents and evaluates a teaching proposal composed of several activities for the teaching of intonation with a final task for the practicing of requests, in which seventeen students need to learn to understand and how to formulate requests in a proper intonation during two sessions. Finally, the study presents a series of considerations concerning the success of the students’ specific performance.

The Backyard of EFL Teaching: Issues Behind L1 Prosodic Interference in Russian English

Modern EFL teaching in Russia pays much attention to variations in the cultural schemata represented by students’ L1 and the target language, as well as behavioral patterns of their speakers. However, teaching practitioners scarcely address certain issues of Russian L1 prosodic interference that cause attitudinal confusion on the part of native English speakers. The study explores the wrong pragmatic effects created in English due to the transfer of Russian intonation contours and the reasons behind the failure of Russian EFL teachers to address the issue. Specifically, it investigates English speakers’ negative perceptions of Russian L1 intonation and examines Russian teachers’ practices and beliefs with regard to the place of intonation in a language classroom. The paper draws on findings from recent studies on effects of Russian L1 prosodic features in English and the results obtained from a survey conducted by the author among 29 Russian EFL teachers. The paper argues that whereas L1 intonation interference seriously affects learners’ cultural image, its role in EFL teaching is significantly undervalued as compared to that of grammar and vocabulary. It concludes by suggesting practical ways to facilitate intonation teaching in a Russian EFL classroom.

Visual Display for the Teaching of Intonation

Those learning foreign languages often experience problems in generating correct intonation. Therefore, several attempts have been made to support the teaching of intonation with the help of devices that display the pitch of speech. This paper deals with the development of a visual intonation-display system. In this system, the visual feedback of intonation is given as a continuous representation of the pitch contour containing only the perceptually relevant aspects of the pitch contour. The course of the pitch contour is approximated by a small number of straight lines. This pitch-contour representation is supposed to facilitate the interpretation of the visual feedback of the pitch contour. In many languages, correct positioning of the pitch movements with respect to the vowel onsets is crucial to proper intonation. Vowel onsets are therefore measured and displayed, too. A description of this visual-intonation display system is given, and its possible uses for teaching intonation are discussed.

The Comparative Study on English and Chinese Intonation

Intonation, being the essential element and external form of a language, serves the human beings primarily as a medium of communication. The contrastive analysis of English and Chinese intonation has great significance in the development of contrastive phonology and improvement of foreign language learning and teaching practice. This article attempts to make a contrastive study of English and Chinese intonation from two aspects: structure and function. The differences and similarities between English and Chinese intonation can clarify some misunderstandings in both English and Chinese intonation teaching.

Further Glimpse at Intonation Teaching

This paper sought to find out why intonation has been neglected in the process of teaching pronunciation to EFL learners at Ho Chi Minh City University for Natural Resources and Environment (HCMUNRE) and corroborate that teaching intonation in Yes/No questions and Wh-questions to learners has positive influence on their English speaking skill. The research also suggested some useful in-class activities to teach intonation in Yes/No questions and Wh-questions to EFL learners.

Visual and Tactile Information in Double Bass Intonation Control

Traditionally, the teaching of intonation on the non-tempered orchestral strings (violin, viola, cello, and double bass) has resorted to the auditory and proprioceptive senses only. This study aims at understanding the role of visual and tactile information in the control of the non-tempered intonation of the acoustic double bass. Eight musicians played 11 trials of an atonal sequence of musical notes on two double basses of different sizes under different sensorial constraints. The accuracy of the played notes was analyzed by measuring their frequencies and comparing them with respective target values. The main finding was that the performance which integrated visual and tactile information was superior in relation to the other performances in the control of double bass intonation. This contradicts the traditional belief that proprioception and hearing are the most effective feedback information in the performance of stringed instruments.

Theory and practice of teaching discourse intonation

Discourse intonation attempts to explain how intonation patterns in English affect the communicative value of speech, through the use of falling and rising tones along with changes in pitch. The teaching of intonation seems to sit naturally with communicative language learning, but it is not an easy aspect of English to incorporate into the EFL classroom. Discourse intonation, with its emphasis on communicative value, is appealing theoretically for instructors and for practical reasons (aiding in understanding naturally spoken English) for learners. This paper reports on a study conducted at a language school in Japan, which aimed to establish a balance between the aspects of discourse intonation that could survive in the classroom and those that would help students to better understand spoken English. The study finds support for the teaching of some features of discourse intonation but also suggests that some features are too subtle to survive in practical teaching.

Listing intonation in Cameroon English speech

ABSTRACT: Compelling evidence from the literature on English intonation suggests that the tone patterns of some sentence types like lists have been grossly underresearched. This undercharacterization of listing intonation in English is inferable from the paucity of literature on this topic. The main thrust of this study is to report the findings from the auditory and acoustic analyses of the intonation of lists in read Cameroon English speech. No previous investigation has been aimed at finding out the tone types which Cameroon English speakers assign to items in lists while reading a text aloud. The analysis of a two‐paragraph passage shown to 83 Cameroon English speakers, both female and male, to read revealed that items in lists read aloud are uttered with four tone types in the following descending order of frequency: the level tone, the rising tone, the falling tone and the falling‐rising tone. These findings, on the one hand, are inconsistent with those documented so far with respect to native English varieties, and, on the other hand, have profound implications for the teaching of intonation to speakers of this non‐native variety of English.

Intonation Meaning in English Discourse: a Study of Thai Speakers

At the heart of cross-cultural misunderstandings lie problems associated with intonation features of learners of English (Gumperz et al., 1979; Gumperz, 1982). The successful use of discourse intonation contributes to effective cross-cultural communication, and failure to make use of the appropriate pragmatic discourse features of English intonation jeopardizes effective communication, possibly resulting in serious communication breakdown between native and non-native speakers. Despite its crucial role in communication and language learning, many English language learners have difficulty in using appropriate intonation. A number of studies of second language intonation have an underlying assumption of the role of cross-linguistic interference contributing to a “foreign intonation” (Lepetit, 1989; Hewings, 1990; Wennerstrom, 1994). However, this line of research is in an early stage and the findings are as yet inconclusive. This paper compared the speech of five Thai speakers who were studying for their advanced degrees in science and business in the U.S with the speech produced by five native speakers. The speech elicited from three different tasks was analyzed using Pierrehumbert & Hirschberg’s 1990 model of intonational meaning. The extent to which the intonation produced by Thais diverged from that by native speakers was assessed. In light of the findings, pedagogical suggestions were offered to help improve the teaching of pronunciation, in general, and the teaching of intonation, in particular. Keywords: discourse intonation, cross-cultural communication, cross-linguistics interference