How to teach intonation to EFL students: A focus on communicative teaching methods

The purpose of this article is to provide an account on how to teach pronunciation to EFL learners, with a special focus on intonation as combined with requests. The intention of this study is to stimulate teachers to offer a focus on pronunciation in their classrooms and thus integrate them in the syllabus. Throughout this study, intonation is considered not as a luxury but as a necessity for an efficient interchange in English. It also aims at highlighting the importance of second language acquisition as ‘skill learning’. Concepts such as communication, comprehensible input, noticing and interaction are deeply addressed through this piece of work since they need to be taken into account when dealing with acquiring the language . This research provides a framework of English intonation highlighting the most salient concepts in the field. Firstly, the paper gathers and reviews some of the most outstanding insights from second language acquisition, linguistics and communication. Then, it presents and evaluates a teaching proposal composed of several activities for the teaching of intonation with a final task for the practicing of requests, in which seventeen students need to learn to understand and how to formulate requests in a proper intonation during two sessions. Finally, the study presents a series of considerations concerning the success of the students’ specific performance.


II. Introduction
Among professionals in the context of secondary schools, there is a general belief that students, from all distinct levels of English, are unable to express themselves clearly nor communicate properly.They usually feel extremely afraid of being mistaken due to the pressure they put on themselves.Nonetheless, it should be highlighted that the social interactions students can find when facing authentic situations abroad are barely implemented in language learning classrooms.In fact, from the early stages of second language acquisition, students seldom perform various communicative tasks with the aim of reinforcing their oral skills.As a result, students are not used to interacting in conversation.
Therefore, taking that unfavorable condition into account, my main goal is to foster interaction among students by implementing two sessions aimed at improving intonation by practicing requests, with a focus on learning and enjoying simultaneously.The supporting materials were designed to be engaging, entertaining and educational, taking into account variables such as age, aptitude or motivation.In this work, I will develop a teaching proposal in which students of English as a foreign language at IES Honori Garcia are expected to become more adept at conversational English and improve intonation.I selected most of the materials from the book English Pronunciation in Use (Handcock, 2003 #81814).The design targets practical skills like speaking and listening.The activities performed by my students are grounded on practical contexts so that students can easily apply these practices in real life.Needless to mention, throughout this paper, the idea that the communicative approach should be integrated into the syllabus of the early levels of instructions in any EFL classroom will be reinforced.

Contextualization of IES Honori Garcia
IES Honori Garcia is a state educational center.It is defined as a plural, democratic and non-denominational institution which promotes equality in all its members as well as the reception of any manner of marginalization, intolerance or discrimination, fulfilling the basic constitutional right recognized as the empowerment principles of coeducation, education of values and equal opportunities.It conceives education as a process focused on students' integral development, which helps them grow and achieve a harmonious maturity in the physical, physic as well as social aspects.Consequently, it fosters the capacity to follow their own self-training and acquire full responsibility as well as personal autonomy.Furthermore, it is respectful of all religions, especially those practiced by members of the educational community.
The sociolinguistic reality of the families and the environment where the center is located includes two official languages: Valencian and Castilian.IES Honori Garcia at Vall d'Uixò adopts the two linguistic models established in the current legislation to allow students to master the two languages at the end of schooling, not only as an object or instrument of learning but also in their daily lives.Moreover, this secondary school is authorized to teach certain non-linguistic subjects in English aiming at integrating multilingualism in any classroom.The Normalization Plan of Linguistics, influenced by the multilingualism approach, is implemented in ICT subject in 2 nd year of ESO, Music in 3 rd year of ESO, Technology in 4 th year of ESO and 2 nd year of Baccalaureate.
The relations with the environment are conceived as a fundamental part of the school's own ideology, with a will to actively participate in social events and collaborate with institutions to improve our society.Finally, the center works cooperatively with parents, and it fosters the participation of public and private companies and institutions in the learning process of students through the monitoring of internships in companies.

III. Theoretical framework: learning intonation communicatively
There is a common belief that students lack opportunities to participate in authentic situations outside the classroom, which hinders their chances to improve their communicative abilities.According to Dell Hymes (1967Hymes ( , 1972) ) the term 'communicative competence' is strongly needed to account for language acquisition and language use.Input in terms of Pragmatics as well as Pronunciation is necessary in any EFL classroom in order to develop the required skills for negotiating communicative actions.As a consequence, he claimed that language structure and its acquisition were not context-free, while Chomsky (1975) stated that any consideration concerning social factors were outside the domain of linguistics.
Communication is conceived nowadays as one of the principal achievements in students learning English as a second (ESL) or foreign language.Hence, language teaching and its methodology need to be adapted by introducing not only linguistic or strategic aspects of the target language, but also the development of learners' communicative as well as interactive competence.In other words, they acquire the ability of employing linguistic resources in an appropriate way directed to a specific context (Kasper, 1997;Kasper, 2001).
In order to make learners communicatively skilled, pronunciation, intonation and interaction need to be taken into consideration.Learners should be able to develop the skills that enable them to recognize the intonation within real language use, and practice the knowledge acquired, first in controlled productive activities and then in free integrated activities.
According to Cruttenden (1986), «intonation is composed by three decisive features»: «division of a stream of speech into intonation units, 2) selection of a syllable, which is assigned the 'tonic' status, and 3) choice of a tone for the intonation» (Cruttenden, 1986).The practical activities found in the teaching proposal of this research are derived from the third feature.With the aim of understanding the focus of this study, the suprasegmental learning aspects must be pinpointed: word stress, rhythm and intonation.Indeed, one of the main objectives of this paper is to demonstrate how the suprasegmental-based instruction can increase the communicative competence in EFL classrooms.Even though the focus of the study is on intonation, there is some evidence which shows that the tonal-melody aspect of the language, that is to say, intonation, is harder to learn for EFL learners than word stress in classrooms settings (Tanner and Landon, 2009).
To date, within the process of learning any foreign language, pronunciation, and as a consequence, intonation, still tend to be overlooked, particularly at a beginner stage, as the emphasis is placed on learning lexis and grammar rules (Saito, 2016).Nevertheless, the suprasegmental-based instruction should be considered as «an essential step toward a disciplinary identity» (Levis, 2015).To reinforce this conception, providing a brief evolution of the implementation of pronunciation in EFL educational context is under dispute.In 2001, the Council of Europe's Common European Framework of Reference (Council of Europe, 2018), which describes language ability across six reference levels, excluded pronunciation in measuring language proficiency.In 2005, the first mandatory speaking section in the TOEFL internet-based test (IBT) was set up.In the precedent years, «employment as an international teaching assistant had no speaking requirements» (Isaacs, 2008).Fortunately, from that moment onwards, there was a growing volume of research investigating intonation in L2 speaking assessment.
«There has been surprisingly little exploration of the effectiveness of pronunciation teaching by researchers» (Couper, 2000).Indeed, as Underhill (1994) states, «we are not in control of a practical, workable and trustworthy system through which we can make intonation comprehensible».Against the background of these developments, the proposal in this paper will promote interaction and participation of EFL learners focusing on intonation.

IV. Teaching proposal: intonation, word stress and requests
The following description is based on my own implementation during the second period of my practicum internship.The teaching proposal must be understood within the official curriculum on the subject Practical English as a first foreign language (Valencian Government, 2015 #81824).
My lesson plan was specifically elaborated to cover the oral skills as well as the interaction.In the following section I shall introduce the parts of a didactic unit, except for the evaluation and qualification criteria.The main reason why I could not include the evaluation in my implementation is due to the lack of time and sessions.In other words, I was offered just two sessions to implement my teaching proposal.

Students' Background Knowledge
My teaching proposal is addressed to students of 2 nd year of Secondary Education, where they are taught Practical English (Valencian Government, 2009), an optional subject which provides a privileged opportunity to integrate intonation as it is mainly compiled by tasks and role-plays aiming at using the language freely, with no textbook.
As far as the students are concerned, their ages are comprised between 13 and 14 years old, which means that the course takes place at a crucial period of cognitive, affective and personality development.The average number of students is 17 -11 girls and 6 boys.The language used was English.As a result, students should have a suitable level to follow the class in English, to express themselves properly as well as to produce the required intonation or word stress at any point.Some of the students showed a fair level of English, although deficiencies in the use of intonation and word stress were identified.

Curricular Contents
As previously mentioned, all the curricular contents I selected are included in the relevant regulations (Valencian Government, 2015).The lesson plan is designed to reinforce the speaking and listening skill.Table 2 shows the skills students should have acquired at the end of both sessions:

Objectives & Competences
According to the relevant regulation (Valencian Government, 2009), these are the general objectives established and their respective learning outcomes, which reinforce the oral and listening skills, the ones emphasized in this teaching proposal, whose main goal is to foster students' autonomy in both personal and academic development: • Being able to think and work individually and in groups.
• Become aware of the importance of intonate.
• Learn key vocabulary when produce an appropriate intonation in addition to word stress.• Learn useful techniques to understand and produce proper intonation.• Being able to interact orally with other speakers.As far as the competences are concerned, the communicative competence is conceived as the most significant and it plays a relevant role along this lesson plan.The plan aims at acquiring a sufficient knowledge of English able to guarantee a basic communication among speakers.Table 3 specifies the eight basic competences taken from the State-wide legislation (Spanish Government, 2015).Right below this table, a brief definition of the basic competence applied to this current study will be explicitly described.

Social and Civic ü
Cultural and Artistic -

Autonomy and Personal Initiative ü
Linguistic Communication Competence: this teaching proposal offers students the opportunity to get involved into communicative situations reflecting upon the language itself.Furthermore, this competence provides the students with a basic guidance of how to intonate accurately.
Social and Civic Competence: this competence enables the students to take part of the society they live in as a democratic citizen.It helps forge a constructive relationship with others.
Learning to Learn Competence: this competence involves beginning to learn and being capable of continuing to learn autonomously, when facing, for instance, a challenging situation and thus, adopt a particular attitude towards this situation.It is essential to take into consideration the learning process to examine the evolution.
Autonomy and Personal Initiative: by the implementation of this competence, students are forced to find answers in a rational manner, accepting a variety of possible answers to the same problem without any help or reinforcement.

Methodology
The starting point of this proposal is the conception of constructive learning, which defines significant learning as active, formative, flexible and contextualized.It contemplates the language learning from a skilled perspective, as clearly stated in the introduction.
The methodological approach combines a theoretical class, that is to say, a master class, illustrated with samples of aspects concerning intonation, raise and fall voice of tone (open and check questions) and word stress (distinction between flat voice and the role of sarcasm) with a practical instruction of individual and group work scheduled in two sessions.Practicing what has been learnt fosters problem-solving activities, interaction, as well as exchanging personal experiences.
My teaching proposal begins with those contents which facilitate students' learning, moving from simple and concrete to complex and abstract aspects.Unfortunately, as two sessions are not enough to show this methodology, it can be seen as a starting point.Priority is given to those contents which have a high level of implementation in real context and authentic situations.It is crucial for learners to be aware of the strong link between intonation and attitude.When students are to face future situations abroad, my expectation is that they use a proper intonation in order to be able to communicate successfully with native speakers.

Timing and sequencing
As already stated, two sessions were devoted to the teaching of intonation and word stress.Each session consisted of a fifty-minute class.The sessions proceeded as follows: brief introduction of each student, a teacher's theoretical explanation of what is meant by intonation, performance of several activities to raise awareness as well as acquisition of the importance of intonation and word stress, and a final task based on a role-play to apply what was learnt during two sessions.

Place and supporting materials
All the different activities were expected to be carried out in a regular classroom, already equipped with the necessary devices.Hence, no homework was required in this lesson plan.The basic material needed was a laptop, a projector, two speakers, a clicker or pointer to see the slideshow, my PowerPoint presentation and a pen or pencil for the students to do the activities from the handout the teacher will deliver printed on paper (see Appendix 1).As an optional device, a blackboard appeared as well in order to write down any additional information.Internet access was not required since all the media files were previously downloaded to save time and avoid unexpected issues.

Development of the activities
The first session was conceived as an introduction of the concept of intonation supported with some theoretical aspects together with students' interaction required in specific situations.During the second session, students were able to start practicing while performing several activities to achieve the necessary knowledge concerning intonation as well as word stress.

Introducing ourselves (15 minutes)
Before getting deep into the concept of intonation, I considered useful to introduce ourselves to break the ice and get to know each other as much as possible so that the teacher and the students were able to empathize.From the very beginning, students were asked to start speaking in English.However, the content was quite familiar for them, since they had to mention their name, age, likes, dislikes, and what they would like to study in future (see Appendix 2).

What is intonation? 'The Big Bang Theory' (8 minutes)
Having introduced each other, I started asking my students what they know about intonation.As expected, almost nobody knew anything concerning intonation and I found also difficulties in my students when trying to explain in English their knowledge about it.Because of that, I decided to use a short extract from the situational comedy.
The Big Bang Theory as a hook to catch their attention with the goal of better understanding the importance of intonation when trying to communicate.The situation was based on the fact that the main character suffered from a sore throat.As he was not able to speak, he used an automated voice from his laptop to communicate with his roommate.Obviously, as the message was conveyed in a flat voice, some misunderstandings arose (see Appendix 3).

Understanding the automated voice + Theoretical explanation (7 minutes)
After watching the video, the idea was to know whether students understood the reason why I played this short extract.With the aim to raise awareness of intonation, I wanted my students to tell me whether the automated voice sounded happy, sad or monotonous.Fortunately, they all agreed on the idea that it sounded monotonous.Therefore, bearing this in mind, I provided in class a brief theoretical explanation defining intonation and its relevance in oral communication, shown as follows: 'Intonation is the rise and fall of the voice in speech and is necessary in communication.A correct use of intonation helps to effectively convey your message, but an incorrect use of intonation may confuse the listener, causing the message to be misunderstood or misinterpreted' (see Appendix 4).
As an additional activity, I asked my students to have a 2-minute conversation in pairs as 'robots', that is to say, with no intonation at all.By the time they started speaking normally again, they could easily observe the main difference and they had fun as well.

What is more important 'what or how'? (3 minutes)
In order to make sure that students acquire the required ability to communicate properly, I asked them what they consider it is more important, what to say or how to say it?
They all successfully answered that the how is more important than the what (see Appendix 5).

Theoretical explanation on how intonation should be produced (10 minutes)
Having observed the impact of intonation in daily communication, I provided in class a short explanation of how to intonate when asking and answering several questions, introduced as follows: 'in affirmative sentences intonation falls at the end, but, in interrogative sentences intonation rises at the end' (see Appendix 6).
Nonetheless, there were particular exceptions and I wanted my students to become aware of them, which are not pronounced as the regular rule states since they have a fixed pronunciation.My students needed to learn these expressions so that they could become more fluent.Before I pronounced them following the proper intonation pattern, I asked them to pronounce and, as expected, nobody knew how to formulate 'how are you?' in the correct intonation (see Appendix 6).

Intonation and feelings (7 minutes)
To end up with the first session, my idea was to introduce the relation between intonation and feelings.To reinforce this conception, I showed them the following sentence 'It's raining!' with three different reactions.Students were asked to identify the feeling attached to each picture and reproduce the exact intonation from the sentence (see Appendix 7).

ACTIVITY III 'Open and check sentences' (10 minutes)
A brief theoretical explanation highlighting the basic idea of this activity was required for students to be able to understand 'open and check questions'.Once the concept was explained, students were introduced with an activity to carry out.As usual, first of all, students listened to a conversation in which the main focus was on recognizing the open and check questions.Second of all, it was time to perform the activity drawing a down or an up line at the end of each question (see Appendix 12).

ACTIVITY IV 'Flat voice and sarcasm' (3 minutes)
As a proper way of introducing flat voice, people often employ a strong adjective, like 'brilliant' with a flat voice, to mean the opposite.For instance, when a person says 'brilliant' when something bad happens.This activity required students to listen and compare the pronunciation of the same word in two different conversations.Putting this into practice, students had to draw lines to show whether the voice was flat or high, focusing on the same pairs of sentences (see Appendix 13).

FINAL TASK 'Intonation, word stress and requests' (10 minutes)
As students were used to performing role-plays in this subject, I considered the idea to combine intonation and word stress with requests as a final task.As previously mentioned, it was difficult to evaluate students' intonation in only two sessions.Therefore, considering the lack of time and sessions, my objective was to adapt this teaching proposal to the students' preferences to let them enjoy and feel as comfortable as possible.
Regarding requests, I started by asking them whether they remembered what requests were by illustrating three different pictures in which requests were employed.Having introduced requests in an explicit way, I explained students that they had to perform a role-play combining requests with a proper intonation as well as word stress (see Appendix 14).Last but not least, I asked my students whether they could provide feedback on their feelings and emotions during these two sessions (see Appendix 15).

Strong and weak points in implementation
The students' feedback was positive.Indeed, aspects such as motivation, interaction, participation and communication were mostly present along the implementation.
During the first session, for example, when introducing themselves, they were willing to speak with the aim of getting to know each other before focusing on the content itself.In addition, they had a surprising reaction when I played a piece of the episode from The Big Bang Theory.They could assume with no apparent effort the consequence of not using intonation in daily conversations, even though their background knowledge of intonation, when I explicitly asked them, was limited.Therefore, in order to catch their attention, it was essential to update the contents.
Also, when I showed the slide with the question 'What is more important what to say or how you say it?' they all opted for the how, rather than what.I would like to highlight a particular interaction.One student had claimed from the very beginning 'Yo no voy a hablar en inglés porque no entiendo nada' ('I won't speak English because I don't understand a thing').However, when I was detailing the contents and interacting with the rest of the students, he admitted 'Pues sí que entiendo algo de inglés, ¡qué bien!' ('I do understand some things.That's awesome!').As a result, his motivation increased significantly.This suggests that the role of the teacher is crucial in the development of second language acquisition (Celce-Murcia, 2007).As Canale and Swain (1980) state, there is no way that the traditional teacher-fronted approach could help learners when practicing the dynamic nature of interaction in their target language.
I could also find several weak points during implementation.First and foremost, I could not use my own laptop.Instead, I had to use an obsolete laptop since a specific cable was needed.When I started getting everything ready, I realized that the laptop was not working, so I had to quickly get another obsolete one, which hindered the way my lesson plan was organized and consequently, my nerves were intensified.Still, despite the adverse conditions, I could manage to cover all the contents I had planned.Being more specific, in ACTIVITY I (see Appendix 10), my idea was to carry out an individual contest to observe who would be the first one in reaching the end.Nonetheless, I modified the activity when I realized that students preferred working in small groups.In ACTIVITY II (see Appendix 11), their mother tongue's interference was present when they wrote 'drink the milk', instead of, 'drink some milk'.In ACTIVITY III (see Appendix 12), I found some difficulties when differentiating between open and check questions, as some of them sounded ambiguous.Unfortunately, due to lack of time, I needed to move forward to cover all the contents and activities already planned.In ACTIVITY IV (see Appendix 13), I considered absolutely useful to make them practice orally the distinction between flat and high voice.Once more, the lack of time negatively influenced when performing the activities.Further, when introducing the requests (see Appendix 14), nobody was able to mention any definition or even general comment.Having noticed so, I showed the following slide with the examples, and then, students remembered what is meant by requests.When performing the role-play, I could observe the ease with which they got involved in their remaining roles, since they were used to performing role-plays in Practical English.Surprisingly, when they had to pronounce the particular expressions already seen in class, such as, 'how are you?',most of them employed quite an accurate intonation.In general terms, the expectations were highly achieved despite the adversities.

Suggestions for further implementations
Getting involved in authentic situation is the key to make learners communicatively competent.However, as already stated, the required exposure and its interaction are extremely limited within a foreign language setting.Personally, the ideal evaluation for students to check whether they acquired any remarkable aspect concerning intonation and word stress would be perceived by facing them into a real situation.To do so, it could be advisable to take into consideration as well gestures and body language to make it as real as possible.As a consequence, I would replace the audios with videos so that students can become aware of the importance of body language in face-to-face communication.
Most of the already published master theses which conduct an implementation introduce a placement test to depart from a starting point in terms of level of English.Although I was conditioned by the lack of time, I would have liked to include this too.Nonetheless, I employed other techniques, such as 'introducing ourselves', to obtain a general overview of students' command in oral skills.
Nobody argues about the fact that new technologies should be conceived as a must to take part in EFL classrooms since our students are digital natives.Hence, Information and Communication Technology (ICT) has to be perceived as a tool to achieve a communicative outcome.Thanks to taking the University Master's Degree: Secondary Education, Vocational Training and Language Teaching I had the opportunity to learn valuable innovative tools to facilitate the foreign language acquisition.One of the most attractive applications is Kahoot: Make learning Awesome.Students need a computer or a mobile phone to play this game, and this could be a handicap.Still, it consists of asking some questions regarding the two sessions and the students' name appear on the screen.The quicker the students answer, more points they will get.Therefore, as a further implementation and bearing in mind the statement 'learning and enjoying at the same time' as stated in the introduction, I would integrate a Kahoot game in my teaching proposal (see Appendix 15).

APPENDICES Appendix 1 :
HANDOUT for students to be conducted during two sessions Appendix 9: Introduction of word stress Appendix 10: ACTIVITY I 'Stress patterns of the words'