Second Language Learning and Language Teaching

Consciousness raising
Given the rise of such approaches as FonF discussed in Chapter 2, we can use exer-
cises to make students more aware of pronunciation in general, say, listening to
tapes to discover aspects such as the speaker’s sex, age, education, region, or the
formality of the situation. In other words, rather than concentrating on specific
aspects of speech, the students’ ears are trained to hear things better. For example,
Eric Hawkins (1984) used to get students to listen to noises he made by hitting
objects; they had to invent a transcription system so that they could ‘play back’
the noises he had made. Certainly an awareness of the range of phonological sys-
tems may help the student – the importance of the syllable may be news to them.
Communication
In principle, pronunciation materials could use the actual problems of commu-
nication as a basis for teaching. For instance, both natives and non-natives con-
fuse ‘fifty’ /
fifti/ and ‘fifteen’ /fiftin/ in real-world situations of shops, and so 
on, presumably because the final /
n/ sounds like a nasalized vowel rather than a
consonant.
4.6 Learning and teaching intonation
Acquiring and teaching pronunciation
82
●
What do you convey to someone else when you say ‘John’ with your voice ris-
ing rather than falling?
●
Do you notice when you make a mistake in intonation in the second 
language?
Focusing questions

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Intonation is the way that the pitch of the voice goes up and down during speech.
Many ways of describing it have been tried. The analysis in Box 4.8 shows a
‘British’ style analysis based on nuclear tones – significant changes in pitch on one
or more syllables, here reduced to seven tones.
Learning and teaching intonation 83