FLUENCI AND INTONATION

FluenCi (Fluency for Communicative Interaction) is an EU Lifelong Learning-funded project whose aim is to introduce learners to the importance of intonation in native-to-native communication. It achieves this via a PHRASeCON, a collection of 200 high-frequency collocations and Structured Learning Materials (SLMs), which sensitise learners to the roles of intonation in L1-L1 dialogue.

The Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (UNED) has embedded these phrases into 20 units containing dialogues and related exercises for its students in distance learning programmes.

The other academic partner in FluenCi, the Dublin Institute of Technology (DIT), presents approximately 30 of these high-frequency phrases in an innovative online version, incorporating slow-down technology and new types of listening exercises, which focus the learner’s attention on how the phrases contribute towards dialogic fluency using intonation to flag speaker intention and realised by several key speech features such as stress, vowel length, pitch change and speed of delivery.

A series of seven Activities leads the user from noticing the intonational differences of the (generally) 4 variations per phrase, through an appreciation of the speaker intention to insights as to which of the key speech features studied is used to effect this communicative intention. Users can also study the pragmatics of the scripted – but naturalistic – dialogues, which gave rise to each of the variations contained in each Phrase Module.

The online version of FluenCi, via a set of drop-down Speaker Intention and Discourse Function descriptors, sensitises users to appreciate natural L1-L1 speech in a structured fashion compatible with the Dynamic Speech Corpus, which is being developed at DIT. This is a corpus primarily for learners, and allows them to understand unscripted L1-L1 dialogue mainly as response, rather than as the production of citation form speech. It stresses turn-taking and interactive strategies of speakers in unscripted dialogues between friends and acquaintances.

FluenCi acts as a bridge between scripted and totally unscripted dialogues. While technologically enabled, its impetus comes from the linguistic insights gained in studying speaker interactions in unscripted dialogue. FluenCi is implemented using HTML5, which will facilitate its use across various platforms: desktop, tablet and smartphone.