Introduction

Intonation, as defined by Pickering (2012), is “the systematic and linguistically meaningful use of pitch movement at the phrasal or suprasegmental level” (2012: 280). In 1999, John Levis analyzed the teaching of intonation and argued that “present intonational research is almost completely divorced from modern language teaching and is rarely reflected in teaching materials” (1999: 37). In the years since Levis made this claim, the field has continued to advance, giving reasons for optimism regarding the convergence of research and teaching materials. However, for a variety of reasons, intonation remains a challenge for teachers and students alike, at both the metacognitive and skill levels.

Although excellent suprasegmental textbooks exist, with sections on intonation informed by research, these often focus on getting learners to produce the target intonation itself. Nevertheless, teaching intonation must include metacognitive awareness as well as productive and receptive skills if it is to be successful.

This chapter will consider pedagogical approaches to intonation in theory and in practice, using both examples from textbooks and data from an original study looking at intonation attitudes of L2 learners.

The missing link between theory and practice seems to be metacognition. Citing Goh (2008), Vandergrift and Goh (2012) state: “Metacognition refers to listener awareness of the cognitive processes involved in comprehension, and the capacity to oversee, regulate, and direct these processes” (2012: 23). Bringing research on intonation and metacognition into the classroom has not happened with great consistency, though some work, focusing mainly on the concept of intelligibility in listening and speaking, has begun to look at the role of metacognition and strategy instruction and has implications for the study of intonation (Mendelsohn 1998; Chamot 1995; Goh 2008; Vandergrift and Goh 2012; Rost 2005).

We conclude this chapter with specific recommendations for better classroom practice when teaching intonation with a metacognitive focus.

Theories informing intonation pedagogy

Although it is possible to address intonation in English from different perspectives (see Levis and Wichmann, Chapter 8 and Wichmann, Chapter 10 in this volume), for the purposes of teaching intonation to L2 learners we are primarily interested in the key role intonation plays in implicature.

An overview of research into the treatment of intonation by phonologists and pragmatists is provided by Wharton (2012), who situates the relationship between intonation and inferential intentional communication within a Gricean framework. Wells (2006) goes further in his investigation into the implicational use of intonation, identifying what he calls “the implicational fall-rise”, when a “speaker implies something without necessarily putting it into words[….] By making a statement with the fall-rise, the speaker typically states one thing but implies something further. Something is left unsaid – perhaps some kind of reservation or implication” (2006: 27). Studies of intonation in English as an L2 framed from the perspective of speech act theory (Searle 1969) support the view that this implicational function of intonation is key by including stress and intonation contours (Searle and Vanderveken 1985) as among the devices helping to draw learners’ attention to the illocutionary focus of an utterance.

An open question is the ability of even advanced L2 listeners to attend to prosodic cues or credit intonation with “the power to reinforce, mitigate, or even undermine the words spoken” (Wichmann 2005: 229). Intonation is certainly much more important for ESL than EFL or ELF contexts, where other means than intonation will often be used to indicate stress, focus, and speaker intent (see Hirst and DiCristo 1998). However, when teaching English in settings where non-native speakers (NNSs) will interact frequently with native speakers (NSs) of English, intonational implicature becomes an essential component of instruction, since NSs often use the implicational fall-rise unconsciously; therefore it is less likely to be taught explicitly and consequently unlikely to be attended to by NNSs.

Intonation in practice: an overview of current approaches and relevant research

Original research on intonation

In a pilot study, Reed investigated learner listening skill for and metacognitive awareness of the pragmatic function of intonation to signal speaker intent. Data were gathered in two intact pronunciation elective classes in an academically oriented intensive English program on a university campus in the Northeast. Subjects were high-intermediate and advanced-level students receiving segmental and suprasegmental instruction from seasoned instructors, both using the same pronunciation course book with a prosodic focus. Students received instruction in stress and intonation, including explicit instruction and lab practice producing marked intonation contours and contrastive stress. The researcher sat in on every class session and administered additional diagnostics and assessments at three points in the semester. Pre-instruction assessments of learners’ perceptual awareness and metacognitive beliefs about English intonation were administered. Anonymous student response systems (clickers) were used to elicit multiple choice and true/false responses to determine students’ beliefs regarding the functions of intonation. Finally, students’ abilities to make inferences were assessed aurally using two recorded sentences, one with unmarked and one with contrastive stress, requiring forced-choice responses.

Pre-instruction student responses revealed robust perceptual awareness of English stress and intonation. To determine whether learners perceptually noticed the rhythmic characteristics of English they were asked to identify which, if any, of three one-minute speech samples “sounded like” English, and to report the basis for their determination. The samples, one each from English, French, and Japanese (arguably representing a stress-timed, syllable-timed, and mora-timed language respectively) were same-topic NPR, Le Monde, and NHK radio news broadcasts that had been filtered (low-pass, 400 Hz) to remove lexical information usable to distinguish the languages. Learners accurately identified the English sample, but expressed negative perceptions of English intonation. Specifically, though the English sample contained unmarked (normal) intonation, learners dismissed it as “exaggerated” and noted the “sing-songy” pitch contours as the mechanism by which they distinguished English from the other two languages.

One finding of the pretest was that learners did not attend to marked intonation and sentence focus when trying to interpret an utterance. This was consistent with what Pennington and Ellis (2000) found. The pre-test included the following example:

The teacher didn’t grade your papers.

When asked to answer the question “Have the papers been graded?” learners initially responded in the negative. Told that the answer was in fact positive, they then asked for repeated hearings of the audio recording and mouthed the words “didn’t grade” to themselves while listening. Their responses to the question indicated that they did not believe that intonation had the ability to override words; 70% of the learners in one class and 100% of the learners in another (N = 14 in each class) replied “No” incorrectly, simply because they did not attend to the signal of the marked intonation.

Post-instruction teacher surveys revealed instructor satisfaction on having successfully taught stress and intonation, as measured by students’ coached language-lab production, which did converge on the target intonation of English.

Example: “Some companies in the high-tech sector sell a wide variety of products.”

Nevertheless, despite their awareness of the general intonation contours of English and their successful production of the marked intonation, learners were unable to discern the underlying meaning (implication) signaled by marked intonation. In the above example, when asked what the speaker would go on to discuss, learners said the variety of products, referencing sentence position. While NS listeners might predict that the next sentence would discuss other companies, no learners picked up on the implication signaled by the very same marked intonation they had practised the week before. One student explicitly questioned that idea and said, “If this [intonation] was really important, someone would have told us by now.”

Learners’ strategies for listening did not change over the course of the semester and remained consistent with their beliefs (which also did not change despite the production-focused instruction) that intonation is unimportant and that words trump intonation. Both pre- and post-instruction, learners expressly rejected a role for intonation in overriding surface lexical information; maintained that the sole mechanism for conveying meaning is through the locution, the words of the utterance; and were unable to use intonation, when listening, to grasp speaker intent, the illocution.

Post-instruction surveys conducted by the researcher revealed continuing learner uncertainty about the real-life applications or significance of intonation. Students rejected ever voluntarily producing these patterns outside the classroom, stating they felt “foolish” when producing the target intonation and that the patterns sounded “silly” and “ridiculous”.

Discussion: research and practice divides

In this study, one of the underlying questions that emerged is how to gauge when learners have truly “learned” intonation. The teachers in the study progressed through the materials in the book, which are cumulative and communicative in nature; one expressly commented that students had “learned” intonation after she taught it and they in fact produced it. However, with students finishing the class rejecting the entire idea of marked intonation – both for listening as well as for their speaking – it seems problematic to say that they have actually learned anything about intonation other than the ability to mimic it. Instruction did not move beyond a productive level to a metacognitive level, and because only the researcher asked questions about learners’ strategies and metacognitive beliefs, the teachers were not aware of a problem.

This finding is echoed by others in the field. Gilbert (2014) notes that “because the system [of English intonation] is apt to be foreign to students, they may not actually believe that intonation affects meaning” (2014: 125). She goes on to observe that learners “will rarely tell the teacher that they feel silly speaking this way, and the result will be that they may walk out of the class without having accepted the system at all. Or they may think intonation is simply decorative” (2014: 125).

In production-focused classrooms, therefore, learners may well produce the intonation contours on demand, but they may finish the course expressing uncertainty about the real-life applications or significance of these intonation patterns and expressing ambivalence about adopting the intonation patterns in their own speech outside the classroom (see Mennen, Schaeffler, and Doherty 2012). As observed by Paunović and Savić (2008), “Students often do not have a clear idea of why exactly ‘the melody of speech’ should be important for communication, and therefore seem to lack the motivation to master it, while teachers do not seem to be theoretically or practically well-equipped to explain and illustrate its significance” (2008: 72–73). While current research on intelligibility and intonation in general has moved beyond the native-speaker model (Levis 2005) and acknowledges that some aspects of pronunciation may not be relevant to contexts in which NNSs communicate only with other NNSs (Jenkins 2000, 2002), learners nevertheless need to be able to draw on their understanding of intonation and its pragmatic functions in order to make sense of the implicational fall–rise patterns that NSs use. As Tomlinson and Bott (2013) state, “often what a speaker intends to say is not always directly retrievable from a linguistic form; rather listeners must infer it” (2013: 3569). Therefore, NNS perception is crucial, and so is the ability to not only hear but also interpret marked intonation in English.

To summarize, a narrow focus on production in suprasegmental instruction may lead teachers to falsely assume that students have “learned” intonation and contrastive stress. Teachers may be unaware that students may not only be unwilling to use these patterns in their own speech but also be unaware of the role of intonation in signaling speaker intent. Therefore, production-focused instruction, without an overtly metacognitive approach, masks a gap in instructor and student (meta)cognition.

In part, this gap exists because teachers themselves may have had limited training in teaching intonation. In their survey of pronunciation teaching practices in Canada, Breitkreutz, Derwing, and Rossiter (2001) found that only 30% of surveyed teachers had received any kind of training in pronunciation. A follow-up study ten years later by Foote, Holtby, and Derwing (2011) found that, “For the most part, instruction in pronunciation in Canada has not changed in the last decade” (2011: 1). Since much of this instruction can be assumed to be segmental in nature, we hypothesize that far fewer than 30% of teachers, therefore, have received training in how to teach any of the suprasegmentals, including intonation.

Furthermore, intonation is acquired so early in L1 that it becomes ingrained to the extent that untrained NS teachers tend not to be aware of their own uses of it. We know that intonation (along with rhythm and other prosodic features) is one of the first aspects of an L1 acquired (DeCasper and Fifer 1980; DeCasper and Spence 1986; Spence and DeCasper 1987; Vihman, Chapter 19 in this volume). Newborn preference studies (Moon, Cooper, and Fifer 1993) reveal neonate attention to and preference for “the rhythms and sounds of language” including intonation, to which the infant has been exposed in utero (Karmiloff and Karmiloff-Smith 2001: 43). As Linda Grant has noted, “native speakers use suprasegmental features unconsciously. Like their students, native-speaking teachers are seldom aware of speech features like English rhythm and intonation and how they impact meaning unless those concepts are explicitly pointed out” (Grant 2014: 13–14).

We can find many examples of these subconscious uses of intonation in classrooms. In studies looking at types of teacher corrective feedback and their effectiveness, Lyster and Ranta (1997) found that intonation plays a key role in corrective feedback containing a repetition “of the student’s erroneous utterance. In most cases, teachers adjust their intonation so as to highlight the error (1997: 48). In a classroom setting, after repeated work on third-person singular present tense verb endings, a learner reported about the absence of one of his classmates, saying, “Teacher, every Friday Luis go to the bank.” The teacher tried to point out the learner’s error: “Luis go to the bank?” The teacher’s stress and rising pitch on “go” here would have signaled to NS listeners the exact location of the error, but the learner in question did not attend to the intonation, and instead began attempting to repair his utterance by varying the preposition. The learner’s failure to notice the focus in the teacher’s utterance (signaled by the intonation) is not uncommon: Lyster and Ranta (1997) found that this type of repetition with pitch changes results in successful repair on the part of learners only 31% of the time.

In another classroom setting, when collecting essays on the day they were due, a teacher paused in front of a learner who did not have her essay. “Can I give it to you on Monday?” the learner asked. “You can,” the teacher replied, implicitly indicating a “but” which was unstated (Wells 2006), in this case referring to the late penalty for papers listed on the syllabus. “Okay, thanks!” the learner replied with relief.

As we have seen with the examples from intonation sections in textbooks above, the field is moving toward a more explicit and metacognitive focus that will guide learners toward realizing the importance of these patterns. Nevertheless, teachers, such as the teachers in the study described above and those Grant (2014) mentions, may find it difficult to maximize the potential of such materials. In the absence of formal training in their graduate work, student textbooks therefore have become the de facto training mechanism for many teachers. More explicit statements about the implicational function of intonation, therefore, such as that included in the excerpt from Gilbert (1993), can help teachers as well as learners in the classroom.

Teachers need to be able to identify the mechanisms by which English signals contrast and/or implication and realize that these mechanisms are not linguistically universal. In the examples given above, teachers seem unable to suppress the innate and intuitive use of intonation for implication, even in the classroom, and even when talking to learners, and thus teachers can be said to simply not grasp what students do not grasp about intonation.

When teaching intonation, for example, it is logical to assume that teachers tend to go first to the topics in intonation that they are aware of themselves consciously manipulating (such as sarcasm, etc.); these aspects of intonation, along with the grammar-based intonation contours of sentences and questions, are indeed treated fully in many texts. Consequently, teachers may spend less time on the vast world of intonation that they use subconsciously, especially the implicational fall–rise.

Even for teachers who have not been trained in teaching pronunciation, the importance of intonation for their learners can be explained via reference to pragmatics. Teachers are used to explicitly teaching certain aspects of English pragmatics to learners – for example, teaching beginning-level learners in an ESL context that “Hi, how are you?” is not generally an invitation for them to tell the speaker how they actually are feeling that day. Along these same lines, such explicit instruction into the pragmatic norms surrounding intonation (telling learners directly that intonation can trump the words in an utterance and signal specific alternate meanings) is essential.

Implications for a metacognitive approach to the classroom

As we have argued, relying solely on the production-driven side of intonation for instruction carries significant negative pedagogical consequences. As Grant (2014) argues about prosody in general, and we would argue about intonation in specific, “If the communicative value of suprasegmentals is not made clear, learners may decide learning suprasegmental features is not worth the effort” (2014: 19). This was true of the students reported in this chapter. Clearly, it is essential to go beyond the traditional focus on pronunciation alone, as Grant (2014) says: “As important as what happens on the perceptual, motor, and cognitive levels” in intonation instruction “are the conscious and unconscious attitudes of adult learners toward pronunciation change” (2014: 29). This “making clear” and these “conscious and unconscious attitudes” are of course metacognition in action.

Five recommendations for a metacognitive-focused approach to intonation

Conclusion

In conclusion, we can see that textbooks and pedagogical materials on intonation have indeed improved, dramatically so, in the years since Levis (1999) noticed a divide between research and practice. However, there may still be practical problems in the day-to-day classroom implementation of these excellent materials. As we have argued, teachers can use textbooks that present intonation concepts clearly. They can use authentic materials and engaging, interactive activities. They can even get learners to produce the correct intonation contours on demand, but intonation instruction can still utterly fail if learners have not grasped the pragmatic importance of intonation for communication in English. Learners do not have to adopt the intonation contours characteristic of English into their daily speech, but they do need to be able to recognize these contours when they hear them, notice their role in signaling speaker intent, and discern the underlying meaning or implication that they convey. Teachers play an important role in getting learners to this point, and intonation instruction should focus not just on grammar and emotion but also on implicature, and must go beyond the productive level to the metacognitive.

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