Tag: intonation

Resource: Intonation Graphs

Marc Jones / / Listening, Pronunciation, Uncategorized

As regular readers know, I love phonology and anything to do with pronunciation and listening. I also have a need to make my learners aware of what happens in the stream of speech. They need to catch the intonation to be aware of any discourse functions, any attitudinal functions and, to the extent that they can be considered anything beyond rules of thumb, grammatical functions.
So, intonation graphs. Get the graph, draw the pitch and even write the words on the graph. Something like this.
A graph. X axis is Time. Y axis is Pitch. In the middle of the Y axis, parallel to the X axis is a midline. This graph shows the rough intonation pattern for Michael Caine's line in The Italian Job, "You're only suppose to blow the bloody doors off!"
Get it here as a Word document or PDF.

A sum up and an invitation

Marc Jones / / Pedagogy, Pronunciation

A picture of books
It’s been a good long while since I started this blog and in the meantime I have finished a Trinity DipTESOL and am close to finishing a MA Applied Linguistics & TESOL with Portsmouth University. My Dip was great for the phonology stuff I picked up, and OK for teaching practice (Trinity don’t let you use strong CLT approaches like Dogme or Task-Based Language Teaching with a Focus on Form. You are supposed to teach discrete language points). My MA has been great for access to ideas I might never have come across and, well, library access.
But next steps, Marc? Isn’t the title of this blog Freelance Teacher Self Development? It is. And there will be self-driven development. There are irons in fires and action research projects to fire up.
I have some bits and bobs to send to journals, but I think it would be kind of interesting and perhaps useful for the field of language teaching to have a bit of teacher-based research for teachers, on the internet, gates open, widely participated in. I know peer-review is all the rage, but I think that if we make our mistakes in the open, people can see the limitations of what gets done as well as any merits, and so it’s less a case of the Emperor’s New Clothes but more that jumper that was under some others at the back of the drawer. It’s not something everyone would necessarily be all ‘Wow! Amazing!’ about but perhaps ‘I don’t know if this would work in my setting but nobody would die if anything ended up disappointing me.’ I am a born salesman, I know.
So, here’s the bit I am kind of thinking about: after logging five random lessons starting in October 2017 with the same class, did you teach intonation? Why (not)? If so, how (explanation of method, explicit, differentiated or whole class, etc.) Blog your stuff and we can make it big.
Marc, why intonation?
I like phonology a lot and I’m just finishing something that I needed to think about lot of segmental phonology so suprasegmental is almost a break.
Marc, I want to do something about something else.
That would be fantastic. Let me know because I would be super interested in reading about it.
This is such a stupid idea. People don’t have time.
Maybe. How about people who have the time and want to do it, do it?
Anyway, hit me up in the comments.