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Chapter 6 INTONATION

Intonation is the variation in pitch during speech that conveys meaning and emotion, playing a crucial role in communication. Teaching intonation involves helping learners understand its unconscious processes and how it affects meaning and attitude in utterances. Effective instruction can guide students in making appropriate intonation choices, despite the complexity and variability of its application.

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16 views

Chapter 6 INTONATION

Intonation is the variation in pitch during speech that conveys meaning and emotion, playing a crucial role in communication. Teaching intonation involves helping learners understand its unconscious processes and how it affects meaning and attitude in utterances. Effective instruction can guide students in making appropriate intonation choices, despite the complexity and variability of its application.

Uploaded by

samsunggrandprime.lp
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
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Intonation Chapter 6

What is intonation, and why teach it?


The term intonation refers to the way the voice goes up and down in pitch when we are
speaking. It is fundamental part of the way we express our own thoughts and it enables
us to understand those of others. It is an aspect of language that we are very sensitive to,
but mostly at an unconscious level. In dealing with intonation in the language
classroom, we need to examine the nature of these unconscious processes, bring them to
the surface and show how we believe they work. We need to show learners how the
choices they make with regard to intonation serve to determine the meaning of
utterances. As well as helping to determine meaning, intonation gives us clues about the
attitude of the speaker, or how he feels about what he is saying. We can get a good idea,
for example, as to whether someone is interested, bored, being kind, being honest or
lying, and so on.
There are languages in which intonation has quite a specific meaning function, such as
the various Chinese languages. These are called tone languages and they use the voice
in quite a different way. The pitch and movement of the voice on a syllable determines
the meaning. The main difficulty for teachers and students with regard to intonation is
that its links with specific grammatical constructions or attitudes can only be loosely
defined. The reason for analysing these links is that the same words and structures can
be given different meanings, or convey a different attitude by altering the intonation.
Grammatical and attitudinal analyses of intonation can offer no hard and fast rules, but
they can help steer students towards appropriate choices of intonation.
The advantage of this approach is that it is possible to give clear rules with regard to the
appropriate choice of intonation patterns in a given context.

Tones, tonic syllables and tone units


Utterances are made up of syllables and the syllables where the main pitch movement in
the utterance occurs are called tonic syllables. The syllables that establish a pitch that
stays constant up to the tonic syllable are called onset syllables.
Attitude and intonation
Another way of looking at intonation is to consider how it varies according to the
speakers’ attitude towards a situation. For example, the simple sentence That would be
nice (in response to an invitation, let’s say) might show enormous enthusiasm, mild
pleasure, surprise, relief, sarcasm and boredom, among other possibilities. In real face-
to-face communication many things contribute to how the message is delivered and
understood including, for example, our observation of the speaker’s body language, and
our knowledge of his personality and likes and dislikes. Intonation gives important
indications, but it is also important to appreciate that our choice of grammar and
vocabulary can also be a very obvious indicator of our attitude towards a situation!
Discourse and intonation
A discourse approach to intonation examines how the stresses we make, and the tone we
employ when speaking, relate our utterances to the surrounding language. The term
“discourse”, refers to a stretch of meaningful language. Intonation can be used to
present ideas and information within utterances, conversation or monologues.
How teachable is intonation?
The fact that the same thing may be said in different ways, at different times and for
different reasons, leads to a potentially bewildering range of choices for students. A part
of the art of successful teaching in in helping students to narrow down the number of
available options, and to make appropriate choices with the language they use.

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