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I've definitely tried to incorporate more variety into my drilling exercises since the start of the PDG, with mixed results depending on the class (ranging for good natured laughter to confused looks, like "has Eszter finally lost it?").

I've also trained my second (Int) class to notice the relationship between rhythm and stress, and recognising the "telegram" aspect (as Jo Gakonga put it), that if I write the words out separately, they more or less get the meaning of the sentence, even if it's incorrect grammatically.

I'm wondering if the "telegram" analogy could be changed into an exercise, like asking the students to take a text and distill it into a telegram, or to combine it with sentence transformation and the language of news headlines to make tweets (in the olden days, a tweet used to be 140 characters, an SMS text message used to be 160...).

I'm definitely formulating a role play exercise in my head which combines several of the intonation exercises: a phone roleplay, which could actually be done on the phone (students calling each other on WhatsApp from another room) with the added challenge of a bad line, a dropped connection, a noisy environment and no body language/facial expressions to help. This could include intonation of lists/phone numbers, spelling of their name, corrective stress ("Do you want a table on the thirtieth of June?" "No, the THIRTEENTH of June!" "Okay, so the thirtieth of July, right?" "No, the thirtieth of JUNE!" etc), sounding interested/bored/friendly/excited/sarcastic (etc). This could possibly be done after some separate controlled practice of these different forms of intonation. My hope is that combining a realistic (-ish) scenario with the added challenge of technology and the students being able to use their phones, would get even those students engaged who are not as interested/excited about intonation and stess as the others.

/Eszter

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I really like Jo Gakonga's videos – I watched quite a few of them when I was preparing for my peer observation. I have a new found love for sentence stress, especially playing around with which word is stressed for emphasise the meaning we want to convey. I have incorporated this into both my Pre-int and Upper-Int classes and the students have really enjoyed them.

I often draw students attention to the fact that if they dropped all the function words and had only the content words that they would be better understood than spending ages trying to get their grammar correct. It's particularly important for Asian students such as Japanese students who tend to have quite flat tones when speaking. Drawing attention to intonation and rhythm can make a massive difference to them making themselves intelligible.

I really like the BBC pronunciation videos, handy tips for making life easier for students. Their tips on making word stress more fun are great and I think I'll add some more kinaesthetic activities into my classes as I like to get students up and moving and to feel the rhythm of the language! Lots of great ideas to try out :)

Ali

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Stress and intonation are undoubtedly linked to meaning. This is especially evident when we hear our students speak, especially when they are trying to express emotion, and adopt the intonation (or don’t use intonation) from their L1. It creates a communication breakdown or leads to misinterpretations as it is borderline impossible to communicate in English without appropriate stress and intonation. Even though it can be quite trying to teach to lower levels, it can be a lot of fun with higher levels. Varying speed and volume during drilling as well as mumbled speech are very good ideas to help students practice and at the same grasp their importance.

Moreover, I particularly like “expressing different emotions” during drilling. It is something I have tried with pre-ints and they loved it and I definitely intend to take it a step further. It makes sometimes mundane drilling much more interesting and fun. Pronunciation activities which really engage students are more memorable to them, which I believe leads to effective learning. In the future, I will try to use rhythm-based drills more in class. I really like the idea and can see the many benefits they have for learners.

Daphne

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When I taught in SS/D, all the kids were so conditioned into, when asked how they were, replying
"Ine fine-an-YOU?!!"
It was the most ridiculously shrill intonation I've ever heard, but I get why they do it. They've been taught that way. It's the same for a lot of lower levels of GE; the process the language goes through is rather hurriedly applied rather than believed and this makes the language sound silly and even insincere, which is crazy because there's some intonation in all spoken languages; shouldn't we all understand it naturally?
Intonation is, in fact, a unique language within every language.

I really like to use a change in pitch or volume to demonstrate the difference in sentiment. At lower levels,  students are generally more receptive to intonation before understanding what you're actually saying, even if they come from tonal language backgrounds. I guess body language is something we're not really here to talk about but it also plays it role.
However, I generally prefer to teach higher level classes and to that end, I'm going to prepare an Int+ lesson plan to encourage students to consider their intonation and body language through a series of role plays and perhaps even a "Faux Pas"  list - things that could be easily misunderstood and cause embarrassing misunderstandings. The important goal is to create an awareness of the significance of intonation in English and to motivate students to listen more actively in day-to-day interactions.
There's no better class than the outside world.

PS: For those teaching Cambridge exam classes, it's worth noting that pronunciation, including intonation/sentence stress/individual sounds, etc.,  accounts for 20% at PET & FCE and 16% at CAE of the total marks.
When students fail, they usually fail by 15-20%.
It also helps engage the speaking partner, promoting Interactive Communication, another 16-20%.
You get the picture!

Fergal

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When boarding a simple dialogue for lower levels I will work on intonation with wh questions and Y/N questions with respect to politeness. Also giving telephone numbers ( listing items); exchanging information (asking questions, checking);  showing interest in conversation,  are other important features to highlight and teach in class.

However, I'm not so concerned about intonation with question tags as getting students to use them in the first place can be an uphill struggle.

One activity I did last week was getting students to write out their presentations. Then then had to mark the punctuation: for a comma, (upward arrow, raised intonation) and downward arrows marking lowered intonation at full stops. They then rehearsed these before reading them out loud in small groups. A useful classroom application of intonation teaching for presentations.

Patrick

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Intonation is an aspect of pronunciation that I've been trying to include more in my lessons, so I was glad to find a number of useful ideas in these videos. Joe Gakonga's videos were really nice and useful because she talks about some of the common tendencies in intonation, while also acknowledging the fact that intonation can change with accent (like the Australian accent, which goes up a lot), "personal idiosyncrasy" as she puts it, and so on. Also, her reference to her own attempt to learn Czech was interesting - learning Czech but usingEnglish intonation led to a friend telling her that she sounded like she was talking to a baby, Czech being a language with much flatter intonation than English. Of course, we're teaching English, not Czech, but this point helped me imagine what it might be like for our students when their trying to wrap their heads around intonation in the classroom.

I also liked her idea of doing mumble drills, where students are encouraged to say sentences in a mumbled manner, in order to focus on the sound, and the idea of varying speed and volume during drilling, to make it a little more fun and engaging for students. I plan to try these techniques in the near future.

The other videos also had some ideas that I intend to use in class. The BBC videos were good. The idea of "emotion dialogues," where students say one sentence like "What are you doing?" in different ways - angry, confused, interested - seems like a nice idea, and I think my upper-int class would enjoy it. They also mentioned humming dialogues (quite self-explanatory) and I think I'll try this technique in the near-future too.

The video on rhythm was also useful, but I've actually already been doing a lot of rhythm-based drills with my classes after we did them in the workshop with Billy. For example, with a sentence like "I went to the cinema with my friend," I'll alternate between saying the full sentence with stresses and just saying the stresses: "Went, Cinema, Friend." I find it good because it helps bring the stresses into stronger focus. It's one of the techniques that I've recently integrated into my teaching that I feel most comfortable with and confident about.

This should provide a good outline of my near-future "intonation plans." Hopefully these activities and techniques will prove enjoyable and useful for my current and future classes.

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There were lots of ideas I found useful in the videos. I found Jo Gakonga's first video a handy introduction to how stress and intonation communicate differences in meaning and emotion, and the practical value of turn taking and sounding interested as well as polite. I also liked the idea that although it's not an exact science there are patterns that can be identified for learners and the use of exaggeration and gesture also helps students. Her second video was useful on content words being stressed and there were some good ideas on mumble drills and shadow reading that I am going to try and take into the classroom. The St George's video reiterated the idea of stress changing meaning albeit in quite a dry manner. Much more fun were the BBC videos and I took away some good ideas about contrastive stress and differences in the stress of 'wh-' questions, yes/no questions, question tags and lists. I already try to highlight stress in new vocabulary and major/minor stress in multi-syllable words as advised in the video and the general patterns they refer to are also effective for teaching. I thought the elemental english video was a bit unengaging but what it did highlight is that students whose L1 is a syllable timed language often have issues with sounding natural. The comparison between Japenese and English is something I plan to use. The BBC video on suffixes gave some good tips that I think would be useful for higher level learners. I'm going to take some of the ideas mentioned into my future teaching and hope to incorporate them in a general way into my current methodology.   Bryan

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