TEACHING INTONATION WITH EXPLICIT INSTRUCTION AND AUDIO-VISUAL TECHNIQUES

Teaching stress and intonation has been noted by many ESL (English as a Second Language) teachers and researchers to be extraordinarily difficult. 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. In the current study, Chinese L2 learners were explicitly taught and tested on three English intonational pragmatic patterns (contrastive stress, implicational focus on the verb, and indirect insults masked as compliments). Combined with explicit instruction, the training included audiovisual techniques: visual intonational contours in addition to auditory stimuli. The 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 a 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 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.