Helping learners understand and use discourse intonation

Author(s):  
A.A. Lipina
Keyword(s):  
2004 ◽  
Vol 145-146 ◽  
pp. 219-268 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lawrence Zhang

This paper reports on two phases of a study of a group of advanced TEFL (teachers-of-English-as-a-foreign-language) students. To raise their awareness of the importance of discourse intonation while they were receiving teacher training, this study focuses on examining their sociocultural and psychological inclinations in the choice of phonological models. The first phase is an exploration of their attitudes toward, a native-speaker variety (British English) and a nonnative (Chinese EFL-speaker) variety of English pronunciation and intonation. The second reports on a didactic intervention study of the impact of activities that engaged the students in the awareness-raising of the importance of suprasegmental features, especially discourse intonation, on self-perceptions of their efficacy and confidence in communication. The results showed a systematic pattern of participant endorsement for a native-speaker model and a clear improvement in theIr perceptions of the importance of suprasegmental features of standard English because of teacher-student co-construction of meaning through interactive awareness-raising activities. The findings are discussed with reference to the students' sociocultural and psychological needs in TEFL training, particularly with reference to recent academic discourse on the issue of “linguistic imperialism” (Canagarajah, 1999; Phillipson, 1992, 1996) and ElL in pedagogy (Jenkins, 1998, 2002) and their wider implications in typical EFL contexts.


2016 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 139-153
Author(s):  
Judit Nagy

Abstract The management of given and new information is one of the key components of accomplishing coherence in oral discourse, which is claimed to be a problematic area for language learners (Celce-Murcia, Dörnyei, and Thurrell 1995: 14). Research on discourse intonation proposes that instead of the given/new dichotomy, givenness should be viewed as a continuum, with different types of accessibility (Baumann & Grice 2006). Moreover, Prince (1992) previously categorized information structure into Hearer-old/Hearer-new and Discourse-old/Discourse-new information. There is consensus on the fact that focus or prominence associated with new information is marked with nuclear pitch accent, and its main acoustic cue, fundamental frequency (f0) (Ward & Birner 2001: 120). Non-native intonation has been reported to display numerous differences in f0 range and patterns compared to native speech (Wennerstrom 1994; Baker 2010). This study is an attempt to address the issue of marking information structure in existential there sentences by means of f0 in non-native spontaneous speech. Data originates from task-based interactions in the Wildcat Corpus of Native- and Foreign-Accented English (Van Engen et al. 2010). This paper examines two issues: (1) information structure in relation to the notions of givenness and different types of accessibility (Baumann & Grice 2006) and to Prince’s (1992) multidimensional taxonomy and (2) the use of f0 peaks to mark the prominence of new information. Several differences were measured among native speakers regarding the use of f0, sentence type, and complexity.


Author(s):  
Gösta Bruce ◽  
Marcus Filipsson ◽  
Johan Frid ◽  
Björn Granström ◽  
Kjell Gustafson ◽  
...  

2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Winnie Cheng ◽  
Chris Greaves ◽  
Martin Warren
Keyword(s):  

ELT Journal ◽  
1997 ◽  
Vol 51 (2) ◽  
pp. 117-125 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. Clennell
Keyword(s):  

ELT Journal ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 63 (4) ◽  
pp. 342-352
Author(s):  
M. Beaken
Keyword(s):  

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