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I would also go along with the idea that intonation and stress can be taught at all levels, with activities suitable for each level.

I like the dramatic dialogues as a way for students to have fun with intonation and stress. Paul Harvey's idea to make dialogues as real as possible is spot on. Adding class specific themes can also be great fun.

Reading aloud to practice intonation is really important. Many students like the idea of doing this little and often at home, and even recording themselves reading and tracking their progress.

Listening activities and drilling, as Gerard Kelly wrote, can also be of great benefit to students. I suppose some learners will independently pick up intonation faster than others, which is why stress and intonation awareness, activities, and practice are probably important at all levels.

Paul

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I agree with the others that intonation and sentence stress should be taught from A1 level. Although some of the articles were critical of textbooks, I've found English File Elementary is actually quite good on sentence stress (though not so much intonation) and the dialogues in the 'Everyday English' parts at the end of some units are quite natural and fun. In some of the readings in other tasks it's been mentioned that the lexis and form used in teaching pronunciation should be relevant and suitable for students and I think that's very important when teaching intonation and sentence stress. Even in the first week of an elementary course simple phrases like 'WHERE do you LIVE? (to the first student) and 'WHERE do YOU live?' (to the next student) can be highlighted or how 'Sorry?' and 'Sorry' have rising or falling intonations. This can be practiced in a circle with a simple ball toss game and is a great icebreaker.

Sentence stress and intonation can have significant semantic importance so they can't be ignored. As some other teachers have mentioned a lot of higher level students have missed out on focusing on these skills and though they have a range of vocab and form, they sometimes fail to acknowledge or enact tonal nuances in the language. Hancock's assertion that receptive skills should be the main target is a good guideline but it's also important not to set the bar too low and to encourage and help students to produce better intonation and sentence stress. To that end, the ideas and tips in Paul Harvey's and Antony Spears' articles were excellent, creating contexts and using drama to work on these skills. I've found in my current elementary class that doing small roleplays relating to the students' day-to-day lives- like at a Tesco checkout or ordering in a café- not only improves awareness of intonation and sentence stress but also solidifies a lot of functional language and useful vocab. Exaggeration definitely helps, as Kelly recommends, and when they start laughing it's always a good sign that they're tuning in to variations in tone and stress.

Ciarán

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I think we should start teaching intonation and sentence stress right from elementary, as many others have said. It really can help lower levels make themselves understood with a pitch change and also open their eyes to how the music or rhythm of the language can do so much to communicate meaning, when their grammar or vocabulary may fail them.

I think the assumption that learners will pick intonation up over time is erroneous, as I have Japanese students in my Upper Int class who have a very good grasp of English but very little concept of how varying tones can impact how they are understood. They haven't picked up intonation, and given their accompanying problems with listening they are unlikely to just start picking it up. Raising their awareness to the rise and fall in tone and noticing how a change of sentence stress can change the meaning of a sentence, is one way of improving their intelligibility and listening.

I really enjoyed Gerald Kelly and Mark Hancock's advice for incorporating such activities into class on a regular basis and making them fun. I particularly like Hancock's minimal pairs activity. Kelly also makes it sound so simple to integrate into each class, and it should be thought of in those terms. As he says, if we can explain it to students then we can understand it better ourselves, and that works for me!

Ali

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I've been reading other teachers' answers, and feel like whenever I tried to teach intonation, the ones who got it the most were the ones who were using intonation and happily put themselves into a "role" straight away anyway. Maybe it's just that the students are checked out at the end of the term, but trying to role play dialogues with the correct intonation rarely works well. Based on Harvey's article, I'm probably using the wrong dialogues...

Definitely going to steal Oisin's idea of trying to say "Really?" with different intonation for different emotions (sarcasm, surprise, happy, sad, angry etc.), and I like the idea in Harvey's article about trying to perform the dialogue in different styles.

I'm not sure when we should start teaching intonation... I guess we could try to invoke the intonation patterns of students' L1 to help at lower levels (if it exists in their language, and we happen to know it). There's definitely a lot of room to be creative and have a bit of fun, I'm just trying to think of how best to engage everyone and not just the ones who enjoy exercises with stress and intonation anyway.

/Eszter

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Before you can run, you must learn to walk. Before you can speak, you must understand. Stress and Intonation play important roles throughout a person's life, never mind a student's. From early words of encouragement to understand the nuances of daily interactions, S&I are the unwritten, spoken languages within all languages. Misunderstand them and you may as well not speak the language at all.  So of course they should be taught.
The question is how to teach it.
I think the Gerald Kelly article is bang on. Intonation can be a slippery wan and adding insane jargon into the mix will only discourage the weaker, less-motivated/confident student.
I really agree with the 'Removing what it's not' idea. I find some students are naturally curious about their intonation but unable to identify how they should go about getting it right. By helping the student to eliminate the intonation that it's not and at the same time letting them hear their own errors, they will eventually develop an understanding of it.
Again, I feel that in order for students to learn and be tested in their comprehension of the meaning of I&S, they need the real world experience. So, probably getting them to engage in in-class role plays based on real world scenarios might give them the taste they need to understand its importance.
Exam listenings at B2 plus levels always contain a part testing the speakers attitude towards something, so certainly for exam student's it worth it.

Fergal

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I also believe it is important to teach stress and intonation at all levels. From elementary level, students need to be exposed to aspects of stress and intonation and start becoming aware of their importance both for listening comprehension and language production. I think of it as the -ed ending: even though students only begin to pronounce it correctly after pre-int, it is drilled from when they’re first introduced to the past simple. Similarly, I think it is equally important to do the same with stress and intonation. Even though they might not be able to produce it (or even identify it) until they reach a higher level, it should still be taught.

Hancock’s article gives a real insight on teaching methods in a clear, straightforward way. I must say though that Harvey’s article really gets to the point. Many teachers, including me, tend to shy away from teaching stress and intonation as it is sometimes harder for students to grasp. Teaching it in a more creative way gives it meaning and gives the chance to learners to actually experiment with the language and produce meaningful or even entertaining stuff. All in all, I do believe it is important to teach stress and intonation, but at the same time give students the chance to experiment with these aspects of speech.

Daphne

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I think sentence stress and intonation should be taught as soon as a learner begins learning sentence formation.

While I agree that these aspects of speech are acquired over time with learners simply ‘picking it up’, formally teaching these aspects will allow students to develop their voice much quick and in a much more coherent way.

The risk with learners ‘picking it up’ outside of the classroom is that the learners won’t sound naturally fluent. They will be mimicking sounds and stress from countless different sources and could lead to a ‘mish-mash’ of accents and dialects. Formally teaching student’s sentence stress and intonation can limit the chance of them picking up bad habits and produce a natural fluency which is comfortable for them and their accent.

For those reasons I think it should be taught from elementary level.

Mark Hancocks article is an invaluable resource for teachers on approaching intonation. Each of his games sound enjoyable and can easily be adapted to suit any level learner. I particularly like the tone trainer and have adapted the design to use in my own class room and used a similar model to incorporate sentence stress.

Gerald Kelly’s article is very reassuring to me. He explains how although intonation is very important, the learner “doesn’t need to know the significance in detail”. What this tells me is that as a teacher you need to be aware and make efforts in heling the students with intonation but that it can be done in a relaxed pace without the learner having to understand and worry about the importance.

Paul Harvey’s dramatic dialogues article is a lovely and coherent and I have a new found respect for the versatility of dialogue practice.

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Task Eight

I think sentence stress and intonation should be taught as soon as a learner begins learning sentence formation.

While I agree that these aspects of speech are acquired over time with learners simply ‘picking it up’, formally teaching these aspects will allow students to develop their voice much quick and in a much more coherent way.

The risk with learners ‘picking it up’ outside of the classroom is that the learners won’t sound naturally fluent. They will be mimicking sounds and stress from countless different sources and could lead to a ‘mish-mash’ of accents and dialects. Formally teaching student’s sentence stress and intonation can limit the chance of them picking up bad habits and produce a natural fluency which is comfortable for them and their accent.

For those reasons I think it should be taught from elementary level.

Mark Hancocks article is an invaluable resource for teachers on approaching intonation. Each of his games sound enjoyable and can easily be adapted to suit any level learner. I particularly like the tone trainer and have adapted the design to use in my own class room and used a similar model to incorporate sentence stress.

Gerald Kelly’s article is very reassuring to me. He explains how although intonation is very important, the learner “doesn’t need to know the significance in detail”. What this tells me is that as a teacher you need to be aware and make efforts in heling the students with intonation but that it can be done in a relaxed pace without the learner having to understand and worry about the importance.

Paul Harvey’s dramatic dialogues article is a lovely and coherent and I have a new found respect for the versatility of dialogue practice.

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I think that sentence stress and intonation should be taught from day one. When intelligibility is the main concern for most students, it is important that they are at least aware of these features of speech. It can be difficult for lower levels to grasp but it is important that they have at least been introduced to these concepts.

I have done a lot of work on this with my elementary class & I have definitely noticed an improvement in their listening comprehension. I often board sentences that they found difficult from listening tasks or sentences from readings, etc. & ask students which words should be stressed (i.e. which are the content words) & where there would be linking (like consonant to vowel, etc.). It was definitely a challenge at first but they really enjoy it now & they often tell me what is linked/stressed as soon as I've finished writing the sentence on the board! It's obviously not perfect & they are not yet fully confident in reproducing it in freer speech yet, but at this level I feel like it is enough that they are comfortably recognising sentence stress & therefore able to understand much more of what they are hearing.

I find intonation a little bit harder to teach, though it's probably down to lack of practice more than anything else. I did some work with my elementary class but they found it quite difficult, particularly for some of the Chinese and Japanese students. They tended to shout the word that should be stressed or have different intonation. I really liked the dramatic dialogues from the Paul Harvey article though. His article has some really good advice & I can see how the students would get a lot from the dialogues without it being too taxing. I will definitely be trying these with my classes, even if just for the sake of comprehension at lower levels rather than reproduction of intonation patterns.

Kathryn

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I think sentence stress and intonation should be taught and incorporated in classes of all levels from the get-go.  I agree with Bryan in that I don’t think it’s always necessary to have an explicit exercise/lesson on stress but rather getting into the habit of incorporating it into grammar/vocab lessons as a way of enhancing understanding of structure and meaning.

The importance of stress and intonation shouldn’t be undermined and overlooked for many reasons, from reading aloud in class and doing presentations to real-life situations where students may come across as being bored. Moreover, not being able to pick up on subtleties like What’s your name (as opposed to What’s his name)or at higher levels sarcasm may leave a student feeling embarrassed and disheartened. I think with native speakers, how something is said carries as much meaning as what is actually said.

There’s lots of really useful material in the articles which could be adapted to different levels. Hancock as always has great ideas. I particularly like his activity in punctuation and how it totally changes meaning, which is something that often goes unnoticed or ignored by students. Harvey has great suggestions for using dialogues – I’ll definitely take these ideas into my classes. It’s a fun and creative way of practising stress and intonation and because they are “not themselves” they can really go for it without feeling embarrassed.

To sum up, I think stress and intonation should be introduced as soon as possible. If students are living in an English speaking country they will be exposed to it everyday as it’s a vital component of our language so the sooner they can recognise it and later, produce it, the better. It is necessary however to be considerate of the level you are teaching and selective with materials but I think viewing stress and intonation as an extension of grammar/vocab lessons is a great place to start.

Eva

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I'd also go along with the idea that stress and intonation should be taught at all levels, with a focus on concepts and activities useful for students at all levels. I liked Paul Harvey's dramatic dialogues as well as the idea of practice activities being as close to real life conversations as possible.

I suppose there are lots of opportunities for stress and intonation work in the first and second classes as we board both prescriptive and emergent language so that I can get myself and the students into the habit of being aware of and practicing this as it arises in class

Paul

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Sentence stress and intonation should definitely be thought at all levels. It is true that in the past, particularly with sentence stress, I would only teach it with higher levels but as I’m teaching an low elementary level now, I can see the benefits of using it from the very beginning.

Before if I had been doing a grammar point, I would have always used the strong form of the language with lower levels as I was focusing more on individual sounds and getting students to think only about this. I guess I was worried that it would be too much. But I know realise that students want to learn to speak like us and getting them doing it from the very start gives them a great head start.

Intonation is something I need to work on and teach more of in my class. I do always stress the importance of not being flat when reading or practicing a dialogue in class. Even when groups are doing interview, I joke with them and say the sentence without intonation and ask if that sounds natural. I feel this brings awareness to them but I don’t often teach it. I liked the maze suggested in one of the readings and will try that out soon.

Like all aspects of pronunciation, understanding intonation and stress is incredibly useful for listening as well. This is very clear when students are doing exams such as FCE or CAE, where understanding the listening may come down to intonation: do they sound positive or negative. This is also true for stress. Recently, I’ve been getting students to focus on the stressed words, as these are usually the important words, and not to worry about getting everything.

Graham

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I feel that sentence stress teaching should begin at Elementary and I know because I have been doing it with my very low Elementary class since last week, and they completely get it! They never sounded so clear and understandable as when we focused on sentence stress. I began teaching sentence stress to my intermediates shortly after this course and they greatly enjoyed it, and some of them were even annoyed they never had done it before. Once it was introduced they immediately understood why native English speakers were so difficult to understand; and this had previously been very frustrating for them, and we even had some very musical classes where I put a metronome on the electronic board on they said stressed words to it and then fit the other parts of the sentence around them, always keeping time.

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I feel that sentence stress teaching should begin at Elementary and I know because I have been doing it with my very low Elementary class since last week, and they completely get it! They never sounded so clear and understandable as when we focused on sentence stress. I began teaching sentence stress to my intermediates shortly after this course and they greatly enjoyed it, and some of them were even annoyed they never had done it before. Once it was introduced they immediately understood why native English speakers were so difficult to understand; and this had previously been very frustrating for them, and we even had some very musical classes where I put a metronome on the electronic board on they said stressed words to it and then fit the other parts of the sentence around them, always keeping time.

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As for intonation, I have much less experience teaching this but thanks to these articles I will be using the dramatic dialogues they suggest; and I saw in the new pronunciation books provided several exercises I will use soon. The one class I did focus on intonation (besides the rising intonation in questions, which is a constant feature I impress upon students) was successful, where we focused on the different ways of saying 'really?' to show sarcasm, boredom, disbelief or interest.

I fundamentally disagree that these are features learners 'will pick up over time.' Certainly some students, usually in my experience the more melodic, sociable and fun-loving ones spend a lot of time mimicking and experimenting with intonation and stress, but these are nowhere near the majority; and you must impress it upon them with specific classes, and then, later allow it to become a feature of every class involving speaking or listening. I certainly didn't understand sentence stress or intonation before I became a teacher, so I wouldn't understand a student to.

O I S I N

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Teaching intonation can be a difficult task.  A functional approach helps: showing interest; asking questions( Yes/No and Wh questions) etc. In think students often have problems being misunderstood with regard to intonation. They can come across as rude, disinterested or even aggressive. It helps to tell them why this happens and to point it out on the board when drilling sentences using arrows. It helps to demonstrate the difference between polite and rude intonation.

Having said all that, making students aware of intonation is one thing, but getting them to produce it is another. How effective is the teaching of intonation? The jury is still out on this. It's not always apparent but as teachers we have a role to raise awareness of it and hope some of it sticks.

I think at low levels try to avoid overloading students as there's a lot going on in processing language. They have to process the lexis and meaning then try to get the basic sound units right. This is all before intonation licks in.

Patrick

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The question of what level to start teaching intonation is an interesting one, because it forces a teacher to focus on their students' ability to comprehend the complex ideas expressed by intonation. Can a pre-intermediate student, for example, wrap their head around these complex ideas, or does he/she need more time to "get used" to English pronunciation, grammar, etc. before taking on this task. My view is that it all depends on the specific intonation topic that is being taught.

In my opinion, some topics of intonation like question tags can be taught from pre-intermediate onwards, but intonation exercises that require students to deal with complex concepts and meaning should be avoided. Over the period I've been teaching, I've arrived at the opinion that a student's ability to understand concepts in a foreign language (in this case English) goes hand in hand with their level of general competence in that language (grammatical, lexical, productive, etc.) This may seem obvious to some, but given the fact that many of our students have worked in conceptually complex field such as engineering, computer science, law and so on, it's at least worthy of note. In other words, we could be teaching a pre-intermediate Brazilian lawyer, who deals with very complex ideas on a daily basis in her own language, but ask her about a concept usually dealt with at int. or upper-intermediate and she'll be lost. I've seen this numerous times, and what I glean from it is that there's something about lacking competence in a new language that hinders our ability to deal with complex concepts in that language. Anyway, I appreciate that this point has been a little long-winded and some may agree, but this perception has a considerable bearing on this question of what level to teach intonation at.

So considering my previous point, my general opinion is that you can teach intonation at every level (perhaps with the exception of beginner or elementary), but it needs to be the right topic and that topic mustn't go beyond the students' ability to process ideas at the given level. So pre-ints can learn about intonation of question tags and listing intonation, ints and upper ints can perhaps learn about tonic stress and other topics, and advanced students can try to fill in the gaps so they have a good, rounded understanding of the complexities of intonation. I also liked the idea in Anthony Spear's article Getting the Emphasis Right, which mentions an idea called sensitisation, an idea that, for me, suggests that by teaching the common and important aspects of intonation, we make our students more aware of it, and that this awareness helps students to develop their intonation both inside and outside the classroom. So, in conclusion, I feel that we can teach students about intonation from low levels, as long as the particular aspect we're teaching is graspable for that level.

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Intonation  = Abby

Teaching intonation should be taught at all levels.  I understand that some ESL teachers take it for granted as something that seems natural and easy to 'get'. However as a lot of Intonation lessons are scripted reading it can actually be enjoyable for all levels. The examples given in Mark Hancocks Intonation  essay are simple sentences which can be enjoyed by all levels. A great example was ‘playing deaf’ which is specifically about times. All levels seem to struggle with the 50 vs 15 number intonation so I will definitely try this in class. It can even be extended with money vocabulary how much does it cost, 1.13 or 1.30 - For example.

The Importance of Intonation should be acknowledged by teachers early on. Rising intonation to indicated interest and helps students understand the difference between being bored (falling tone) or being interested (rising tone).  The pitch gym is good with the thumbs up and thumbs down approach to questions and assertions with rising tones. This is helps build confidence regardless of language ability so I would definitely try this with lower and higher levels too.

I do think intonations can be taught.There are lots of good information here Gerald Kelly’s table is nice and clear. Students could write their own examples after they understand. Even if they have difficulty mastering our natural intonation easily it will at least help students understand native speakers better.   -   Abby

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I think the consensus is that stress and intonation should be taught at all levels. One of the many pointers I am getting from the course is that these skills do not always need to be taught as explicit exercises. I've become much more aware that in my grammar and lexis teaching I should incorporate things like stress and intonation as natural elements that enhance understanding of structure and meaning, not impede it. Mark Hancock's minimal pairs exercises are interesting and  I agree with his view that it's the teacher's responsibility to raise awareness of stress and intonation but not to be prescriptive about it. This is borne out in Gerald Kelly's article and also that you can rely on yourself as a teacher and not be over-awed by the technical terminology. What really brought home its importance to me was Anthony Spear's example about 'Who/Where/When' in relation to 'I went to the bank on Thursday'. A really simple but effective example. Paul Hovey had interesting ideas about dramatic dialogues but they might work better in a review week because of the time needed. They may not play to every teacher's strengths, a love of drama/acting would definitely help. Russel Stannard had some fun links and ideas but I do think that students don't need any further encouragement to be on their phones. A student working on their own would of course improve but 'bouncing off' classmates is always preferable in my book. In short, stress and intonation should be included at all levels and I plan to try and do this.
Bryan

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I think that stress and intonation should be taught at all levels. The line that could perhaps be drawn could be between being aware and being able to reproduce the intonation/stress variants. I would say that at beginner/elementary level it could be useful to even just understand other speakers, while from pre-intermediate onwards students might get a motivation and confidence boost if they manage to reproduce the target language accurately and with the correct intonation/rhythm.

Spear and Hancock’s activities could be used with the above idea in mind. For example, the dialogues with different variations of pause and sentence stress could be paired up with quick drawings on the board to show the different situations at lower levels, while at higher levels they could then be used as a prompt to get the students to create new dialogues with the same communicative intentions.

Fran

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I think pronunciation should be taught from the beginning. Sentence stress is certainly something that can be easily integrated into an elementary lesson – how are you? What’s your name? It’s an easy place to start. Low-levels do have the ability to grasp basic intonation, it’s just a matter of dispensing the information slowly but regularly. My elementary class generally react well to intonation activities like basic and corrective stress dialogues, and some learners have expressed their happiness at being able to sound more like a native speaker.  Though, of course, the activities have been basic and short so far. I think too many words on one page has the tendency to terrify them.

There’s a lot of good material in the articles. Three Takes on Intonation is packed with material that can be adapted to suit any level ‘Jim was here’ – who was here? He wasn’t here? He was there? Is incredibly succinct. His ‘punctuation minimal pairs’ is a good one. I’ve tried something similar with higher levels before, but this one I think you could try with an elementary or pre-int class. The maze is simple and I’d imagine it to be quite effective and entertaining with every level.

I found Paul Harvey’s article on dialogues really interesting. It’s a good idea to keep them short and preferably humorous to maintain interest. I often find that students can lose steam quickly reading textbook dialogues so getting them to create their own going by genres or in the style of well-known actors could work well, though perhaps not with elementary students – again, I think it’s crucial to keep it often but simple when it comes to teaching lower levels. I think that stress and intonation is something that can be taught at every level, you just need to be selective and sensible with the material.

Shaneen

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I think stress and intonation should be taught at all levels, but it is important to modify the activities we use to the different levels. At higher levels, students might be aware of the importance of intonation but might not be confident or unsure how or when they should incorporate it naturally into their speech. Students do not need to become experts in intonation, but regardless of their level I feel it is important that they are aware of the different patterns of intonation or when their voice should rise or fall in every utterance, as this will make it easier to understand others and be understood themselves.

Lower level students are perfectly able to understand that intonation can change the meaning of an utterance. If we ask the question “What’s your name?” with a falling intonation – we’re asking for new information, it’s a genuine question. Whereas if we ask: “What’s your name?” with a rising intonation, the speaker has probably asked before, but needs confirmation or has forgotten.

Regarding sentence stress, I don’t feel that students at an elementary or pre-intermediate level would fail to understand the difference between I was in the library (in response to Who was in the library?); I was in the library (in response to I/ He/ She wasn’t in the library); and I was in the library (in response to Where were you?).

Therefore, I think that sentence stress and intonation should be taught at all levels, as tasks and activities can be modified to suit more or less advanced students. Even if students are not able to produce these features correctly, raising awareness of intonation and sentence stress in English will definitely help them understand others better.

Lucía