This document discusses the importance of teaching discourse intonation to ESL students. It argues that traditional structural approaches to teaching intonation in textbooks are inadequate and do not reflect natural speech. Discourse intonation views intonation holistically within broader contexts. The document advocates exposing students to discourse intonation through listening tasks and transcription exercises to help them interpret intonation patterns in authentic communication.

1. Discourse Intonation in ELT
In order to attain total mastery of English language, ESL students should undoubtedly be taught the
intonation of English. Without learning this suprasegmental feature, English learners, regardless of their
level of English proficiency, would be at risk of causing serious communication breakdown with native
speakers. Recent studies show that there has been a growing awareness of the importance of teaching
intonation in ESL classes by integrating it into the main ELT curriculum. Unfortunately, the intonation
rules exemplified in most course books nowadays are inadequate to accurately describe what occurs in
real life communication. In order to improve cross cultural communication between learners and native
speakers, a systematic approach based on discourse intonation is thus called for. Discourse Intonation
views intonation as more than just its attitudinal or grammatical function; it takes intonation to the next
level by looking at the larger contexts where sentences occur. By exposing learners to context-sensitive
language where natural speech occurs, discourse intonation hopes to offer a practical solution to teaching
intonation to ESL students.
In the world of ELT, intonation earns an ever-lasting notoriety as being one of the most
challenging language components to teach. After all, how can one teach the intricacy of a suprasegmental
feature of a language? Intonation is conceptualized in a deeply subconscious level, which even native
speakers find it hard to analyze the patters themselves (Bradford, 1995, as cited in Rannali 2002). The
difficulties inherent in teaching intonation have turned many coursebook writers to present it in a
structurally limited way which, as we shall see later, can sometimes be misleading for learners. This
limitation has been investigated in various studies. For example, Clennel (1996) maintains that there is a
lack of precision in describing suprasegmental features of phonology. This in turn causes materials found
in ELT course books to be insufficient. In the same vein, Thompson (1995) states that ESL teaching
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2. materials on intonation is missing or dealt with in haphazard way causing uncertainty among teachers. It
is no wonder then that the same old favorites to appear in course books again and again, such as the rising
and falling tones in yes/no questions and wh- questions. Cauldwell, and Hewings (1996) demonstrated in
detail a mismatch between what is found in course books and that of a natural speech as follow.
One of the rules most commonly found in ELT course books is that in sentences with a main
clause and a subordinate clause, a rising tone is used for the subordinate clause and a falling tone
for the main clause, as in:
(a) // Before I read this book // I thought stress was an executive disease //
We know that it does not conform what happens in real life speech, for example:
(b) // even if it rains // we'll come //
In this case, the falling tone occurs on the subordinate clause, and the rising tone on the main
clause. Another prime example is the famous rising and falling intonations in yes/no questions
and wh-questions. As illustrated below:
With yes/no questions a rising tone is used, as in:
(a) //Shall we go tomorrow? //
Wh-questions, such as What, Where, When, How, end with a falling tone, as in:
(b) // Where shall we go tomorrow? //
In most cases the rules exemplified above are true but how do we justify the following examples
that come from authentic speech?
(a) //Are they significantly different? //
(b) //'What's a bidet?//
The above illustration suggests that intonation rules in yes/no and wh-questions given in textbook
could not picture the complexity of intonation as used in authentic speech. It is feared that such limited
structural intonation teaching may pose learners to a serious communication breakdown when talking to
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3. native speakers of English. Clennell (1997) mentions three crucial consequences when learners hinge
upon intonation materials in course books:
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.
In order to remedy the numerous problems as faced by learners in communicating with native
speakers, a different pedagogical approach to intonation is thus needed. That is, the approach that looks at
intonation patters in naturally spoken English and how such patterns affect the communicative value of
speech. Such approach is called discourse intonation. Developed in the early 1980s by David Brazil,
discourse intonation looks at the act of speaking in a broader way, where the speakers can either signal
the listener the information as ‘new’ or ‘given’. Speakers use these various prosodic components to
indicate to listeners that they have finished speaking, that another person is expected to speak, or a
particular response is required. As Roach (2009) puts it, the regulation of this turn-taking in everyday
conversation is analogous to footballers who look for someone to pass the ball to, or when they are ready
to receive the ball by using body language such as eye contact, facial expression, gestures, and head
turning. Because it is discoursal in function rather than accentual or grammatical, its fundamentally deals
with speakers' moment-by-moment context-referenced choices. It features four systems of speaker choice:
tone unit, prominence, proclaiming and referring tones, and high/low key. Each of these systems adds an
increment of interpersonal meaning to the discourse between speaker and listener.
In the light of above descriptions, it is clear then that only with discourse intonation can we
provide learners with satisfactory explanation for the intonation as used in real speech, a major point
which the structural view fails in. Furthermore, its top-down processing enables learners to see intonation
holistically as used in a genuine real life communication rather than just an artificial message taken out of
context in structural forms. Such analysis of everyday speech is hoped to bring learners’ understanding of
intonation from simply the level of perception to interpretation (Atoye, 2005). Other key benefits to
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4. teaching discourse intonation have been shown in various studies. For example, Chapman (2007) points
out that discourse intonation helps learners develop better listening comprehension, overcome
grammatical understanding of NS utterance, and gain the conversation management function.
Knowing what a discourse intonation is and how its teaching proves to be beneficial to our
students, our big question now turns to how we translate it systematically into something that is both
teachable and learnable. As we understand it, discourse intonation is context-sensitive by nature.
Pedagogically, it implies that teachers would have to expose their learners to intensive listening for
changes in intonation patterns. Chapman’s study reveals that a pre-listening activity based on a task-based
approach proves beneficial to students learning discourse intonation. These tasks specifically asked
learners to speculate what they were going to hear before listening to the tape and later compare it.
Clennell (1997) proposes alternative pedagogic implications. First of all, the prosodic terms need to be
explained and clarified to students. Secondly, demonstration of how those terms work systematically and
grammatically is given. Finally, ask students to transcribe recordings of native-speakers in different
informal speech situations using the terms explained by the teacher.
This paper concludes the current materials on intonation in most course books, which heavily
cling on structural analysis, should be evaluated. If learners were to succeed in their interaction with
native speakers, a deeper analysis of intonation should be used. Discourse intonation provides a better
picture of how intonation works in real-life speech by using context-referenced choices in their prosodic
features. Failure to use one of these appropriate features would lead to a misunderstanding or even an
offence. Indisputably, ESL teachers need to readily equip themselves with the awareness of these features
by studying current researches on discourse intonation.
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5. References
Atoye, R. (2005) ‘Non-Native Perception and Interpretation of English Intonation’, Nordic Journal of
African Studies, Vol. 14, no.1, pp.26-42
Cauldwell, R. and Hewings, M. (1996) ‘Intonation rules in ELT textbooks’, ELT Journal, Vol. 50, No.4,
pp.327-334
Chapman, M. (2007) ‘Theory and Practice of Teaching Discourse Intonation’, ELT Journal, Vol. 61,
no.1, pp.1-11
Clennell, C. (1996) ‘Raising the Pedagogic Status of Discourse Intonation Teaching’, ELT Journal,
Volume 51, no. 2, pp.117-125
Discourse Intonation. (n.d.) in speechinaction. Retrieved March 6, 2011, from
http://www.speechinaction.net/SPARC_DI.htm
Rannali, J. (2002) ‘Discourse Intonation: To Teach or not to Teach?’ Retrieved March 17, 2011, from
http://www.cels.bham.ac.uk/resources/essays/Rannali4.pdf
Roach, P.J. (2009) English Phonetics and Phonology, 4th edn., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
(first published 1983).
Stibbard, R. (1996) ‘Teaching English Intonation with a Visual Display of Fundamental Frequency’,
The Internet TESL Journal, Vol. 2, no. 8, pp.1-14
Thompson, S. (1996) ‘Teaching Intonation in Questions’, ELT Journal, Vol. 49, No. 3, pp. 235-243
Vaissière, J. (2004) ‘Perception of Intonation’, Handbook of Speech Perception, D. B. Pisoni and R. E.
Remez. Oxford, Blackwell, (in press). Pp.1-28
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