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

Abstract

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.