Teaching English Intonation to EFL/ESL Students

Mehmet Celik

mcelik@hacettepe.edu.tr

Hacettepe University, Turkey

This article proposes a workable, teachable, generalisable as well as communicatively efficient framework for the teaching of the intonation of English to non-native speakers of English. It is proposed that a framework of English intonation should include four major intonational features: intonation units, stress, tones, and pitch range. Consequently, the phenomena of intonation in English should have a piece of utterance, intonation unit, as its basis to study all kinds of voice movements and features. Every intonation unit has a type of tonic stress: (unmarked) utterance-final tonic stress, or emphatic, or contrastive, or new information stress, the last of which is more frequently used in utterances given to wh-questions. Further, intonation units have typically one of these tones; fall, low-rise, high-rise, and fall-rise. Tones are assigned to intonation units in relation to the type of voice movement on the tonic syllable. Finally, all intonation units have to be spoken in one of the three pitch levels (keys): high, mid, and low.

Introduction

At a time when the language learning task is geared to instant interpersonal communication with efficiency and precision, the intonation phenomena could not have gone unnoticed in the preparation of English teaching syllabuses in the threshold of a new millennium. What to include and what not to in the teaching of intonation to learners of English as a second/foreign language (ESL/EFL) has caused uncertainty and lack of confidence, and consequently ignoring of the intonation in syllabuses to a great extent, which is, as Underhill (1994:75) rightly notes, because '...we a

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