Teaching English intonation

at the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (U.L.P.G.C.)

Mercedes Cabrera Abreu (U.L.P.G.C.)

1 Introduction

In this paper, I present an overview of the context in which English intonation is taught at the U.L.P.G.C.. The course follows the lines of the Summer Course in English Phonetics at University College London, but due to the circumstances I shall describe below, the overall approach is rather different.

I shall organise this paper as follows: first, I shall describe the current situation, which is not the optimal one for teaching intonation since the number of students is too large. Then, in an effort to cope with such situation, I shall describe the teaching methods I have used over the years. After that, I shall turn to the advantages and disadvantages of such methods, followed by a brief description of the evaluation system, and students' performance. Finally, I shall point out a few actions for the future.

2 Current situation

The U.L.P.G.C. is relatively new, being founded as such in 1989. The course on English intonation started in 1996, and is optionally followed by students doing a 4-year degree in English Philology, and 3^rd and 4^th year students can register. Students doing other degrees within the Humanities can also register. Thus, an unlimited number of students can join this course.

Fortunately, such a number has remained just over 100, as can be seen in the table below, in which the academic years (1996-97, 1997-98, 1998-99) are represented in each column against the number of students.

Table 1. Number of students registered for the course

Student numbers has also decreased over the years: from 29 in 1997-98 to 39 in 1998-99. The reasons for this may be various, like for example, the complexity of the topics in the course or student’s negative attitude towards the course. But the one which was really determinant is the following: during the year 1996-97 the offer on optional courses in the department was extremely limited, and students were almost forced to take the course in English intonation.

Ideally, the number of students in an intonation class should be around 10. Given the circumstances I have just described above, the situation at the U.L.P.G.C. is far from ideal.

In relation to the number of lecturers, there is only myself lecturing on this course, and my teaching load is already full. In this context, the solution of splitting up the larger group into a set of smaller ones is not feasible.

In such adverse circumstances, and in order to make my teaching more effective, I have had to vary considerably the teaching tools as a function of student numbers. Let us turn to their description, in the following section.

3 Teaching tools

The teaching methods I used during session 1996-97 included a 50-minutes lecture (with some practical exercises), a laboratory session, and also tutorials to which students can attend without previous appointment. I shall describe the lectures and the lab sessions in more detail below (§3.1 and 3.2).

During session 1997-98, the picture is rather similar, only that there is more practice-time involved in the lectures, and that I introduced an assignment which I shall also describe in the following sub-sections (§3.4).

In 1998-99, the course has become rather more elaborate, with the addition of one back-up class, and a small alteration to the assignment, which I shall also refer to below (§3.3).

3.1 Lectures

In this course, there are four 50-minutes lectures in a week, and this runs during 15 weeks. For these sessions I distribute a complete handout which includes the main ideas in a particular topic (like for example, the nuclear tones of English), and plenty of practical exercises. Such a handout is some times used over more than one lecture.

The practical exercises are designed to improve student’s perception and production of English intonation, and they are organised as follows: in the case of the former, students are requested to identify and discriminate, say, a particular pitch movement, or a small set of nuclear tones over a single syllable or short utterances. As far as the production exercises are concerned, they go from chorus repetition to individual repetition. There are also some exercises which require pair work, and class performance.

3.2 Laboratory sessions

Some of the time assigned for tutorials has been allocated to lab sessions. By taking advantage of these few hours, groups of 8 students were organised. Each group attended two lab sessions, one at the beginning of the course, and the other at the end. By means of using some computer software (Visi-Pitch® and Multi-Speech®), I demonstrated the differences between intensity and pitch, and some pitch movements. Students were also encouraged to use the computer software themselves, and to produce and identify some simple tunes.

3.3 Back-up classes

Some time dedicated to tutorials has also been used to organise one back-up class for groups of 8 students. During such sessions, a worksheet was distributed in which students had to describe and produce the intonation marked for some simple utterances and a short passage.

3.4 Assignment

I have decided to include the assignment as another method for student’s learning of intonation, although it could also be treated as an assessment method. The reason for this is that by means of analysing the intonation of a short passage, student’s perceptual skills are greatly improved. In addition, they also have a chance to put into practice all the perceptual, analytical skills they have developed throughout the course.

The assignment was organised as follows: in groups of three, students had to analyse the intonation of a short passage of recorded spontaneous speech. In addition, they had to draw tonetic diagrams showing the pitch height for every single syllable in the complete passage. Furthermore, they had to justify and comment on particular sections from the passage. In order to perform this task, students had been cued into the intonation of the passage. For instance, they had been to identify the strategy used by the speaker to show emphasis in her speech.

4 Advantages and disadvantages of the teaching methods

There does not seem to be a real disadvantage to the teaching methods I have described above, if only there were more human resources to monitor individual student’s performance.

On the other hand, the advantages are many. First, I have created an awareness among students that intonation exists, and that it constitutes a powerful tool in language communication. Second, by means of the lectures, they receive a balanced in-take of theory and practice. Third, tutorials, back-up classes, laboratory sessions, and assignments, all help to develop student’s production and perception skills. Finally, the laboratory sessions have offered visual feed-back support to their analysis and understanding of intonation contours.

5 Evaluation system and student’s performance

This course’s evaluation system consists on three obligatory papers, the results of which count towards the final grade. Thus, the dictation paper amounts to 25% of the whole mark of 10. The written paper amounts to 40%, and the oral test — together with class participation and the assignment — amounts to 35%.

5.1 Student performance

Student performance is illustrated in the following table:

Table 2. Student results

As already mentioned, the number of students has decreased over the years, but there has been an increase in the number of passes: from only 61 out of 101 students in 1996-97, to 31 out of 40 students in 1998-99. In addition, there is a drastic reduction in the number of fails over the years: from 31 during the first session, to 3 in the last session. That is, 60% in the first year, to 7.5% in the last year. In relation to the number of drop outs, the number has also decreased.

There are a set of factors which may have influenced the increase in the number of passes. For instance, the fact that the offer in optional courses has widened in the Faculty of Philology in the last two years has lead to the course being followed-up by students who were really committed to working hard on the topic, and to learning more about it. So, student’s interest on the course has influenced the results.

Other related factors are the following: first, a reduction in student’s numbers, and secondly, an improvement in teaching methods. These two factors are tightly linked since, had not there been a reduction in student numbers, it would have been practically impossible to alter, and hence, to improve the teaching methods. But another way to think about these two factors is to consider the hypothetical situation in which both the student numbers (over 100), and the teaching methods had remained unchanged. Given this alternative, we may wonder whether the trend in the number of passes would have been the same or different. Intuitively, I am inclined to assume that the number of passes would have remained constant, or otherwise, dropped. However, a definite answer is left until the future.

6 Future action

In future years, there should be an increase in the number of back-up classes, so that the amount of student’s practice-time (especially for production skills) also increases. In addition, other activities should be incorporated to the course like, for instance, the analysis of short television dramas and comedies, and role-play activities, so that students can feel the different functions of intonation in context. Such activities could be supported by comments from feed-back obtained from video-recording student’s performance in the latter case.

7 Conclusion

In this paper, I have described the context in which the course in English Intonation is taught at the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. The main idea has been that there has been a drastic reduction in student numbers over the years, and that this has lead to an alteration in teaching methods. These and other factors have been beneficial for student performance in the course.