Abstract:

Teaching stress and intonation has been noted by many ESL (English as a Second Language) teachers and researchers to be extraordinarily difficult. Celce-Murcia (1995) states “…I am still having problems with fully integrating stress and intonation into my teaching of English pronunciation... this is an area that I and other teachers must continue to work with and improve.” Very little progress has been made in this area since then.
Even high-level L2 (second language) learners of English lack knowledge of intonation and the corresponding meanings, creating potential problems in communication between them and native speakers. A challenge is to first develop an efficient method to improve perception performance. I have developed a short training that involves a three-fold procedure: combining audio examples, visual representation of intonation in these sentences, and an explanation of how to connect the pragmatic meaning to each tune.
Audio examples have traditionally been used to train L2 learners on intonation. Visual representation of intonation has more recently been introduced into intonation teaching and research, but is not yet widespread. Typically it has dealt more with the production side, wherein L1 (first language) and L2 contours are contrastively compared. Moreover, there is a general lack in ESL of explicit instruction on the relationship between intonational tunes and their intended meanings. This may be attributed to a preferred non-interface position. Nevertheless, it has been shown that explicit learning can lead to implicit learning (cf. McLaughlin, 1990; McLaughlin et al., 1983; O’Malley & Chamot, 1990), the end goal of a language learner.
It is difficult to make the leap from simply hearing a sentence or seeing a visualized pitch contour to the intended meaning. Only with a vast amount of experience with the language would this be a simple task. Hence, to aid second language learners in understanding these lesser-acknowledged patterns, explicit lessons are useful.
In the current study, three intonational pragmatic patterns, contrastive stress, implicational focus on the verb, and indirect insults masked as compliments, were taught explicitly with inclusion of audiovisual techniques and tested. The pre-testing and post-testing involved a forced-choice task in which participants were presented an auditorily stimulus and asked to choose between a congruent and an incongruent follow-up sentence. They were tested on thirty unique target stimuli mixed in with thirty fillers in both the pre-test and post-test. Giving even a very brief but concentrated training between the pre-test and post-test in specific intonational patterns has demonstrated marked improvement in preliminary perception results from the current study. It is proposed that this kind of training could serve as a model for teaching many other specific intonational patterns with regards to perception and ultimately production.