Raising the pedagogic status

of discourse intonation
teaching
Charles Clennell

At the heart of many cross-cultural

misunderstandings
lie problems
associated with intonation features of learner English. Failure to make use
of the appropriate pragmatic discourse features of English intonation may
result in serious communication
breakdown
between native and nonnative speakers of even advanced levels ofproficiency.
This article sets out
a case for teaching the pragmatic
(discourse-based)
features of English
intonation to overseas students studying on tertiary-level
ELT courses, in
order to improve cross-cultural
communication
at both receptive and
productive stages. Drawing on data from advanced /eve/ EAP learners, it
advocates a systematic approach to the teaching of the pragmatic
and
discourse functions of English intonation through a consciousness-raising
methodology
that uses authentic academic oral texts.

Introduction

Reasons why
intonation
is
poorly
understood
and
inadequate/y
taught

Its not what she says, but how she says it. This clich is worth bearing
in mind when one considers the communication problems even
proficient non-native speakers face when interacting with native
speakers in tertiary-level academic contexts. Drawing on data and
materials developed for an EAP oral language programme, I shall argue
that the successful use of discourse intonation could well be the key to
effective cross-cultural communication. It seems that discourse intonation is a comparatively neglected field in ELT, although there is
evidence of a growing interest in this area in recent years (Thompson
1995, Chun 1988. Bradford 1988. Kenworthy 1987). I will look at the
reasons why intonation is particularly problematic for EAP learners, and
examine three crucial reasons why lack of prosodic skills may jeopardize
effective communication
in on campus contexts, in relation to
propositional content, illocutionary force, and inter-speaker co-operation and conversational management. The article concludes with a brief
sketch of strategies for effective pedagogic intervention to help students
develop appropriate skills in these three areas.
Why do many tertiary-level learners lack competence and confidence in
the area of English intonation? There are a number of related reasons
for this. Firstly, the discourse/pragmatic functions of English prosody
appear to be specific to the English language, and as such are unfamiliar
to most overseas learners of English, regardless of language or cultural
background. Secondly, these discourse and pragmatic functions are not
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readily appreciated even by native speakers, including teachers of

English, mainly because of their inherent opaqueness in the discourse,
and a lack of precision in describing suprasegmental features of
phonology. Few if any teachers come to TESOL courses with an
adequate understanding of English intonation in natural discourse.
Thirdly, interference from the learners may be a problem, especially if
they are speakers of oriental languages, which have a tonal and rhythmic
structure sufficiently different from English to make even basic
competence in the discourse features of English intonation extremely
difficult. And, finally, there is the problem of materials. English
prosody - particularly
its discourse function - is not adequately dealt
with by most available pronunciation coursebooks in ESL, although a
growing number are turning their attention to prosody in discourse
settings (see, for example, Zawadski 1994, Rogerson and Gilbert 1990,
Bradford 1988, Kenworthy 1987).
Definition
of
terms

Some
consequences
of
inadequate
prosody in NS/
NNS interaction

Intonation is a broad term used by phoneticians to describe the effects

of contrastive pitch movement (Crystal 1987: 423) on the meanings of
utterances over stretches of speech (Cruttenden 1986: 9; Roach 1983:
112). Because stress (on a single word or in phrases) has as one of its
chief acoustic correlates a change of pitch, we can consider both word
and phrase stress to be subsumed under the term intonation (Brown
et al. 1980: 31). So intonation relates to the contrastive use of pitch
movement over stretches of speech and the influence this has on
meaning. Prosody is a broader label, which includes stress and
intonation, but also rhythm and voice quality as well as other
paralinguistic (non-verbal) features (Crystal 1987: 169). By using the
broader term prosody we make it clear that all these features play a
significant part in delineating pragmatic intention.
A failure to make full use of English prosodic features has crucial
consequences in NS/NNS oral interaction. Oral communication becomes
more difficult for both parties, for three important and interrelated
reasons:
1 The propositional content (essential information) of the message may
not be fully grasped.
2 The illocutionary force (pragmatic meaning) of utterances may be
misunderstood.
3 Inter-speaker co-operation and conversational management may be
poorly controlled.

Propositional
content

118

Without shared prosodic awareness, at the level of decoding messages,

listening comprehension in English becomes a more difficult activity for
both parties. Native speakers of English mark the propositional content
of the message with stress and pitch in such a way that the content is
hierarchically differentiated in terms of its perceived importance to the
speaker (Halliday 1985: 53; Brown 1977: 90). In this example, a course
tutor is asking a student for clarification:
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1
5647
3
8
2
\/ WHEN did you say youd give your paper?
(mid/high key)
Each lexical item in this utterance would be differentiated by relative
pitch prominence, the most prominent marking (1) being the most
important item (in this case, the word when), the second most
important (2) being the object paper, and so on. This system of
hierarchical prominence is sometimes referred to as tonic (Halliday
1985: 53) or nuclear stress (Crystal 1969: 205). Native-speaker listeners
will assume that their interlocutor will follow this method in allocating
pitch and stress until checked otherwise. Because non-native speakers
do not (in general) follow this system, native speakers are obliged to
carry out a different method of decoding which is more laborious and
slower-namely,
syntactic decoding, which means identifying the
elements
(subject/verb/object/complement/
syntactic
or sentence
adverb). So when a non-native speaker asks a similar question it is
likely that several items will receive equal prominence, as in
When /

MUST we \

FINish this \/ ASSignMENT

By placing prominence on three items (modal auxiliary, verb, and

object) rather than one, this Singhalese speaker has effectively
neutered the pragmatic intention of the utterance. The tutor will
have to infer for him or herself what the students intention might be (in
this case, a request for information about due dates). Such analysis can
be extremely wearing over prolonged exchanges, and lead to listener
fatigue, boredom, and lack of empathy (Clennell 1996).
Overseas students unfamiliar with tonic prominence frequently fail to
perceive the logical prominence of key items, and misunderstand the
propositional content of the message. For example, in reply to the whquestion given above, the propositional meaning might be identified as a
request to know whether the paper would be given or not. Learners
frequently have listening difficulties because they try to identify every
item of the utterance, but are unable to perceive what is intended to be
significant by the speaker. Thus, the tutors reply to the students request
about his assignment might be
The \

DUE date || is next \

FRIDay

This response might not appear to be either complete or appropriate to a

learner of English expecting a direct answer. This simple statement could
be perceived as an evasive tactic rather than a polite request, and lead to
further communication problems. Clearly, students need to be familiar
with a range of possible pragmatic choices in a given speech situation.
This can be done, for example, by exploring different ways of expressing
polite requests in an academic (assignment-oriented) environment, and
examining the implied speaker intentions behind each choice.
Illocutionary

force

The illocutionary force or the pragmatic intention of the utterance may

not be clear to both parties. The failure of non-native speakers to pick
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up sarcasm, for example, is well known. Two prosodic elements - tone

and key - work in different ways to mark pragmatic intention. By tone
I mean the choice of pitch contrast the speaker makes; in English, this is
normally limited to a rise or fall, or a combination of the two (Halliday
1985: 57). By key I mean the choice of relative pitch made by the
speaker which is independently meaningful (Brazil et al. 1980: 24). This
choice is more far-reaching than we may realize. We could play safe and
remain in a neutral band, or we could be decidedly prominent in our
pitch choice when excited or angry (see McCarthy 1991 for a useful
discussion on this topic). The next example shows how sarcasm is
conveyed by the astute selection of a rise/fall tone and a mid/low choice
of key. One might imagine the following comment from a tutor who has
just been asked to take two extra students into his tutorial:
you can i/MAGine
(mid/low key)

how \THRILLed

I was

To reverse the pragmatic intention requires only an overall change of

pitch on the tonic syllable, with a corresponding reversal of tune1 on the
tail2 of the tone group3 combined with a mid/high key. The choice of
higher key makes the crucial difference here:
you can imagine how \THRILLed
(mid/high key)

I/

WAS

This is a relatively small phonetic change, but with profound

consequences for meaning. Notice how the rising tone in the second
version marks additional discourse information - i.e. the topic is not
finished - in contrast to the first version, where the dominant fall
indicates topic termination. It is worth noting that students can be shown
the consequences of such a subtle change in prosody by simply
highlighting similar samples of native-speaker texts in their natural
contexts, and drawing their attention to the pragmatic implications as
they arise. A technique for exploring this kind of approach is
demonstrated at the end of this paper.
Failure to perceive significant pitch change can create subtle misunderstandings in, for example, the confusion between conducive questions
(in which the speaker already has a reasonably clear expectation of the
answer) and non-conducive
questions (in which the answer is
unpredictable) (Tenth 1988 cited in Thompson 1995: 239). Conducive
questions carry (almost invariably) a falling tone:
you were ex\PECTing
(mid/low key)
Whereas in non-conducive
did you ex/PECT
(mid/high key)

a low mark?
questions, both the tone and key are high:

a high mark?

Failure at this level to perceive the speakers intentions and expectations

can easily disrupt the flow of the discourse. And yet this is not in itself a
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particularly difficult feature to train our learners to perceive. Confusion

is often caused when students are advised that questions always carry a
rising tone (one drawback to approaching language teaching from the
lexical or sentence level). Clearly this is not so, as we have demonstrated
above. Rises are given to questions when the speaker does not have a
clear expectation about the reply. So, for example, it is possible for
learners to start from the premise that they do have an idea of what
reply will be given. In speech contexts where conventions are clearly
understood - as in, say, the delivery of a seminar paper - there will be
ample opportunity to practice giving rhetorical questions with falling
tones. In an informal chat with peers, the need to mark questions with a
rising tone may be self evident. The discourse function of such a
technique can be readily appreciated when shown on a transcript and
the interlocutors reply highlighted.
In addition to this, the pragmatic role of intonation can be potent in
conveying the speakers intentions in speech acts (Searle 1969) such as
persuasion, making excuses, or apologies. That this may not be made
clear on the surface is a culturally marked feature of English, so that in
our next example the tutors criticism is marked by a characteristically
low key.
you /COULD

write it \that

way

(mid/low key)
just as
you handled the intro\DUCTion

well

with a marked falling tone and low key selection may sound to the
untuned ear like unreserved praise. Examples like these are not hard to
find in the normal conversational demands of academic life, but how
seldom are such subtleties identified by learners as problematic or, more
important, addressed by ELT specialists as a problem worth exploring?
Yet such misunderstandings are common, and it is important that tutors
are able to express themselves accurately, and know that they are being
understood. There is an identifiable need for a close examination of, for
instance, the different ways tutors moderate their criticism in order to
avoid giving offence, and how this moderation may fail altogether to
achieve its pragmatic intention. This cross-cultural breakdown in
communication can be rectified if both native-speaker staff and nonnative speaker learners are able to explore these misunderstandings in
post-tutorial discussions.
Here is an illustration of how a failure to appreciate specific prosodic
features could cause genuine communication breakdown of a quite
dramatic and unexpected kind. Imagine a university library where an
overseas student of Lebanese Arabic background (A) is asking for a
library loan card. He is handed a form by an overworked male assistant
(B), but on inspection realizes it is the wrong one:
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A:

Excuse \ME.

You have \GIVEn

me the \\WRONG

form

B: Sorry. I gave you what you ASKed for [irritated, appeals to others

in the queue for support]

A: \\ LNO it is the \\
WRONG form
B: OK. Theres no need to be rude
By placing the stress on the premodifier wrong, instead of on the head
noun form, the student (unintentionally) turns what might have been a
simple observation into a direct accusation. In his subsequent denial he
reiterates this accusation, adding to the weight of the accusation the fact
that the assistant is being untruthful.
Negative ethnic stereotyping can easily be fostered by such an
encounter. But it is possible to make use of such incidents to highlight
the need for learner awareness of the social consequences
of
inappropriate prosodic choices. On our EAP courses we now have a
phonological component which deals specifically with identifying and
reproducing prominent stress in different academic contexts, using video
recorded extracts of native-speaker students interacting with their
tutors. Non-native speaker students need to know that their selected
strategies for coping with pitch prominence in English may be
unproductive and even dangerous, as in the example just quoted,
where it would seem that the speaker was using an L1 rule that says
stressed syllables indicate emphasis rather than topic salience (Gumperz
1990).
Inter-speaker
co-operation
and
conversational
management

Not only does intonation differentiate the relative significance of the

items in a message, it also preserves the distinction between what is
given information from what is new (Brown 1983).
Let us take the earlier example from the Lebanese speaker, and imagine
how it might be spoken by a native speaker.
Ex\CUSE me + youve given me the wrong \FORM
The information-bearing items would be different in both tone groups,
so that in the first tone group, prominence would now be on the verb
excuse, rather than the personal pronoun me. In the second tone
group, the last lexical item form would receive prominence. In both
cases, what is being marked as prominent is new information, i.e. the
apologizing word, and the object of the transaction form. Most of the
remaining items are given information, i.e. information that is presumed
by the speaker to be shared knowledge prior to this moment in the
discourse, e.g. personal pronouns me, you, and the verb give. Even
the contentious item wrong may be perceived as given information, in
the sense that the initial apology set up this expectation.
The point is that the essential coherence of spoken texts in English is
maintained by prosodic features (stress, pausing, pitch) which differentiate given from new information.
Without this phonological
coherence, described by Chafe (1992: 39) as the interrelationship of

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active, semi-active and inactive information shared between speaker

and interlocutor, the conversation can become extremely dense and
confused. The equivalent in the written medium would be a text without
punctuation. This sort of coherence (and cohesion) can be demonstrated
to students in the same way that syntactic cohesion can be demonstrated,
by highlighting in transcripts of authentic oral interaction those prosodic
markers that, for example, act anaphorically in the speech situation, such
as Brazils referring tone (see Bradford 1988 for exercises in this
feature). The given/new dichotomy can be illustrated in the same way,
with learners being invited to mark with a g those items that carry tonic
prominence.
Pedagogic
implications

There are a number of related reasons why English prosody is both a

crucial tool for effective oral communication and inherently problematic
for non-native speakers. The question is, what can we do about it? Some
practical suggestions have already been made in the course of the paper,
but there is also a need to clarify and summarize some principles of
curriculum selection.
First of all, we need to clarify the different roles of prosody in oral
communication. These include functions such as:
information marker (prominent stress)
discourse marker (given/new)
conversational manager (turn-taking/collaborating)
attitudinal or affect marker (mood/feeling)
a grammatical/syntactic marker (clause boundaries/word classes)
pragmatic marker (illocutionary force/intention of speaker).
We also need to demonstrate
guiding principles are:

its systemacity or grammaticality.

Some

tone group divisions are acoustically recognizable;

tonic syllables normally occur on one item in a tone group;
tonic syllables are perceptually salient through pitch change;
unmarked tonic syllables are located at the ends of tone groups;
marked tonic syllables may occur on any item for contrastive reasons;
pitch change marks inherent complete/incomplete
dichotomy of
speaker;
relative pitch choice is always significant and part of discourse
competence.
Suggested

teaching
activities

When devising teaching activities teachers should aim to develop

receptive awareness of prosodic skills before practising production by a
systematic exposure to meaningful, authentic, and phonologically salient
texts, e.g. by doing interviews (Economou 1985, Slade and Norris 1986);
by getting non-native speakers to interview and converse with native
speakers, record transactions (Clennell 1995) and then getting students
to transcribe these conversations; and by getting students to mark
perceptually significant prosodic features (Clennell 1986).
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I will conclude with a technique being developed for use with EAP
students at my own institution, which may be of interest to readers.
1 Record

native-speaker students on campus interacting in different

informal speech situations, e.g. with a peer over coffee after a lecture;
with a lecturer after a lecture; with a tutor discussing a paper; at the
library putting in a request form, etc.
Transcribe these recordings and put the text on an OHT with certain
key prosodic features accentuated in the way they have been marked
in this article.
Ask the students to perform the same interaction tasks among
themselves, with the teacher acting as a native-speaker staff member.
Record and transcribe these interactions.
Show students their own texts, and invite them to evaluate them, and
suggest ways of improving the communicative aspects of their
language. Identify and prioritize specific prosodic problem areas.
Invite students to listen to the native-speaker
texts with the
transcription available on OHT. At this point you may wish to elicit
prosodic differences as they appear to the learners after they have
listened to a tape and followed the transcript. In this way it is possible
to highlight the pragmatic/discourse functions of English prosody in a
meaningful context, and raise to consciousness both the salient form
and pragmatic functions of English intonation (Clennell 1996).

Received

Key
\
/
9
\\
II
+

March

1996

Brazil, D., M. Coulthard,

Discourse

fall
rise
fall-rise
extra emphasis on stressed syllables
tone group boundary
pause

Notes

1 Tune = intonation contour or movement over

several items.
2 Tail = any items in a tone group that succeed
the tonic syllable.
3 Tone group = the smallest unit of meaning in
English, consisting of a distinctive sequence of
tones (a contour) and usually with one prominent (tonic/nuclear) syllable.

and C. Johns. 1980.

and Language

Teaching.

London: Longman.
Brown, G. 1977. Listening to the Spoken Language. London: Longman.
Brown, G. 1983. Prosodic structure and the given/
new distinction in A. Cutler and R. Ladd (eds.).
Prosody: Models and Methods. Berlin: Springer
Verlag.
Brown, G., K. Currie, and J. Kenworthy. 1980.
Questions of Intonation. London: Croom Helm.
Chafe, W. 1992. Prosodic and functional units of
language in J. Edwards and L. Lampert (eds.).
Talking Data Transcription
and Coding in
Discourse Research. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence

Erlbaum.
Chun, D. 1988. The neglected role of intonation
in communicative competence and proficiency.
Modern Language

References

Bradford, B. 1988. Intonation in Context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

124

Intonation

Journal 72/3: 295-302.

Clennell, C. 1986. Stress: No ESL lesson should

be without it. Prospect 2/1: 89-98.

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Clennell, C. 1995. An interlanguage

discourse
perspective on the communication
strategies of
second language learners when performing
different pedagogic tasks. Prospect 10/3: 4-18.
Clennell, C. 1996. Promoting the role of English
prosody in a discourse-based approach to oral
interaction. Prospect 11/3: 17-28.
Cruttenden, A. 1986. Intonation. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Crystal, D. 1969. Prosodic Systems and Intonation
In English. London:
Cambridge
University
Press.
Crystal, D. 1987. The Cambridge Encyclopedia of
Language. Cambridge:
Cambridge University
Press.
Economou, D. 1985. Coffee Break: Authentic
Australian Casual Conversation. Sydney: NSW
Education Department.
Gumperz, J. 1990. The conversational analysis of
inter-ethnic
communication
in R. Scarcella
et al. (eds.). Developing Communicative Competence in a Second Language.
New York:
Newbury House.
Halliday, M.A.K. 1985. Spoken and Written
Language. Melbourne: Deakin University Press.
Kenworthy, J. 1987. Teaching English Pronunciation. London: Longman.
McCarthy, M. 1991. Discourse Analysis for Language Teachers. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.

Roach, P. 1983. English Phonetics and Phonology.

(Revised edn. 1994): Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Rogerson, P. and J. Gilbert. 1990. Speaking
Clearly.
Cambridge:
Cambridge
University
Press.
Searle, J. 1969. Speech Acts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Slade, D. and L. Norris. 1986. Teaching Casual
Conversation. Adelaide: NCRC.
Tench, P. 1988. The Roles of Intonation in English
Discourse. Frankfurt: Peter Lang.
Thompson, S. 1995. Teaching intonation
on
questions. ELT Journal 49/3: 235-42.
Zawadski, H. 1994. In Tempo. Sydney: NCELTR.
The author

Charles Clennell is a senior lecturer in TESOL at

the Centre for Applied Linguistics (CALUSA) at
the University of South Australia in Adelaide. His
interests include phonology
and interlanguage
studies, and he has published a number of papers
on his research into the communication strategies
of second language learners from a classroom
discourse perspective. In 1994 he was awarded the
M.A.K. Halliday Scholarship for his work in
classroom discourse research. He is currently coordinating the MEd Studies TESOL course at
CALUSA, as well as developing aural/oral materials for EAP programmes.

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