Urgent: Is polite vs. unmarked intonation real in American English?
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Mxsmanic mxsma...@hotmail.com
I'm supposed to give an ESL lesson on the distinction between polite and neutral intonations for yes/no questions in a few days. In examining the coursebook materials, I realized that I don't actually make such a distinction in American English. Apparently intonation conveys a level of politeness in British English, but try as I might, I can't come up with any type of level-of-politeness distinction in my own American English that is communicated by intonation.
The problem is: What am I to do? Should I rigorously follow the coursebook and drill students based on what's on the tape (spoken by British speakers), even though I don't really perceive any difference in meaning between the two intonations? Should I drill students using myself as model, by imitating the pronunciations on the tape (if I can even do so--I'm not sure I can), even though I never make such distinctions myself? And what should I tell students about the absence of these distinctions in American English, if anything?
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Django Cat nos...@absolutelynospam.com
It's the intonation in the question rather than the answer is it? Can you give us some examples as used on the tape?
In the meantime -
"Do you like cheese?" - flat - disinterested, rude
- slow rise - incredulity - check Dilbert's 'Incredulous Ed' character...
- rise fall - interest in the other person, politeness Are you absolutely sure this doesn't happen in AmE?
DC Cat (BrE speaker) 31 hours to go to ***ignment submission, and counting
Django Cat nos...@absolutelynospam.com
PS which tape/coursebook is it?
DC
Mxsmanic mxsma...@hotmail.com
They are yes/no questions, structured as such, for example: "Could you begin, John?" Apparently there are two possible intonations in British English for this type of question, one being neutral or unmarked, and the other being "polite." However, there is no difference in American English, which typically uses a constant rising intonation for this type of question in all cases (whereas British uses some sort of falling-then-rising intonation). Since I'm American, I have no idea how I'm going to teach this, short of remaining completely silent and playing the tape for the lesson. I'm not even sure I'll be able to hear a difference, much less reproduce it for students. I don't have the tape at home so I won't be able to review it until tomorrow.
See above. Things like: "Could you begin, John?" "Could you say that again?" "May I come in?" and so on.
Hmm. I think I'll have to actually hear it.
I've been trying all weekend to think of intonations that mark the difference, but I always say such questions with the same intonation.
Some searching around the Web seems to support my conclusion that AmE is not making the distinction. American speakers don't use more than one intonation, and they don't usually notice the variable intonations of British speakers.
One could argue that it's pointless to teach students a nuance of intonation that isn't even meaningful outside the U.K., and some of the sources I looked at say as much, but this is the lesson I'm required to give, so I have to go with it. I'm not sure whether to actually mention to students that the stuff I've spent the past hour or so teaching them is moot outside the U.K.
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Mxsmanic mxsma...@hotmail.com
International Express (although this British-only lesson is making me wonder about the "International" part).
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Django Cat nos...@absolutelynospam.com
sounds like one such bee - at least, the exclusively BrE nature of such a feature in the eye of the Tb writer. While one of the features which differentiates the various world Englishes *is* intonation (Australians put a rise tone on practically everything which is why they always sound as if everything is a question - "my names Darleen? I come from Sydney?" - the aural equivalent of perpetually raised eyebrows), I don't think this is a specifically BrE thing - but the textbook writer may think it is. Try teaching Finns sometime if you want to hear what English really sounds like with zero intonation.
Second thought is, is it possible to fall back on the time honoured ESL technique of doing something else with the material if you think its teaching point is bollocks? Instead of using these sentences for pronunciation practice could you make them into a comprehension?
"Now cl***, who has to begin?" (feeble, but it's something).
maybe not then.
Don't. WADR, for better or worse BrE is the prefered model for many International learners, especially outside the Far East, and we Brits generally manage to just about make ourselves understood by English speaking people around the world despite our peculiar intonation patterns and the hegemony of US media. Don't tell me, you're in the Far East, aren't you?
Are you sure? To my ears that would make it sound as if 'John' was what we were asking the other person to begin doing. Just compare with "Could you begin the test". (That comma and question mark aren't there for just decoration or because some grammar book says they should be, either.) Obviously trying to explain pronunciation in a text-based medium is a killer, as is trying to draw lines. Intonation is a complex process based on stress and pitch, sometimes described as the tune of an utterance. Usually people draw a line above a transcription of the utterance from the beginning to the end, which stays flat (Good Morning, Helsinki), goes up, down, or wiggles about a bit.
Here's an attempt:-
____------^^^--- __-__ _________^^^--- -___ _____ ^^^^---__ ----
Well, sort of. Maybe you're right, but I don't really think AmE functions without these or some very close analogies. One approach if you really do have to teach this wretched stuff is to draw the rise fall lines over the sentences on the board. And get the cl*** to repeat the sentences anyway -
it's not entirely illogical to suppose they'll pick up a distinction of intonation which you as an L1 speaker are too close to your own native language to register consciously - not to mention the fact they may well have done this sort of stuff before and know what the txb writer has in mind. Perhaps. If you're still stuck tomorrow I'll knock up an MP3 of examples and send it if it would help (alternatively if you can get streaming audio listen to some stuff on http://www.bbc.co.uk/ and see if your textbook's theory is correct) - and let us know where you are teaching.
Good luck Django 19 hours to go before ***ignment submission, and looking at an all nighter.
Django Cat nos...@absolutelynospam.com
PS again - the guy next door comes from Las Vegas, I must go for a beer with him and check his intonation!
DCC 16 hours to go. Is that a light at the end of the tunnel or the onset of photophobia?
Mxsmanic mxsma...@hotmail.com
Written by Liz Taylor, Oxford University Press, in the UK. It's supposed to be for any ESL students.
Does it actually impede comprehension, or does it just sound weird? I'm not sure that errors in intonation alone are a problem. Not to be confused with stress, of course, which needs to be at least reasonably correct.
Not in this case. This is ESL teacher training. The less I change, the more likely I am to p*** the TP ***ignment.
Europe.
The intonation seems to rise and stay there, at least each time that I say it. Actually I've always had a hard time imitating British intonations, which seem to go up and down a lot. Students say British pronunciation is easier to understand, though--but I'm not sure that intonation has anything to do with that.
If they are questions, the intonation rises for both, at least in my AmE. If they are not questions, the intonation probably wouldn't rise--but I normally don't use question structures as statements, so I'm not sure ("How do you do?" has always sounded strange to me, since my normal temptation is to simply answer the question, and I know that many American speakers are the same way).
At least from the diagrams, I'm not sure I hear a (meaningful) difference.
The several sources I found imply that it does not, and my own speech matches this. I'll have to ask other Americans in cl*** if they make a distinction.
I've thought of that--if I can recognize the intonations on the tape, that is. There's a tendency not to hear features of pronunciation that do not affect meaning.
Yes. I just hope I can imitate the tape serviceably. It would be odd to play _only_ the tape without reinforcing the drill myself, I should think.
Teaching in France, and it looks like I'll be teaching this lesson this afternoon.
What ***ignment is that?
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Mxsmanic mxsma...@hotmail.com
Possible, perhaps, but not realistic.
If the friend was born in the U.S., I doubt that there would be a difference. If he were truly an immigrant from Egypt or South Africa, there might be a difference, but then he wouldn't be a native speaker, anyway.
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Django Cat nos...@absolutelynospam.com
Hi, just quickly...
If you're as worried about this as you obvously are, and it's for TP, you can't fail to gain Brownie Points by discussing your concerns with your tutor before the observation. It'll show that you're thinking about varieties of English, interested in pronunciation systems, concerned about what your learners learn and concerned about your own development as a teacher.
I'm not familiar with it. It may well be the same Liz Taylor who was my DoS at Linguarama in the late 80s, who was a very perceptive teacher and an excellent boss. (A brief Google didn't settle that).
Word stress (and segmental stress) though is one component in the intonation system.
The Finnish accent is very endearing when you get used to it, and rather like how Russians are thought to sound (stand back for howls of protest). Try saying 'when you come to my summer cabin we will have sauna, drink beer and drive in my rally car' with no intonation or stress at all if you want to get the idea (and be accused of outrageous stereotyping).
Not as odd as all that, and it's what non-native teachers the world over are doing right now. Just be sure you're quick on the rewind - if the machine has 'cue' you can just run each bit back at speed until the high-
pitched squeek stops.
OK. Your approach then should be to not be frightened about the issue, but make it part of the lesson:-
"OK cl***, we've got a tape now. Listen to how the people on the tape speak - while you're listening, draw a line to show the intonation. The people on the tape are from the UK - I'm American, do I sound different as I read these p***ages? Does Madame/Monsiuer (fill in your tutor's, the school secretary's etc, etc, etc name) sound different?" and then maybe start a discussion of their perceptions of different world Englishes (quite likely to be wacky) And I've had students say US English is easier to understand. Students are like that.
What is interesting is the number of students recently who've told me non-
native speakers are easier to understand than native speakers. There may well be a research project in that one.
I'm doing a Masters in TESOL & Educational Technology and the term paper is due in at 6.00 pm. I'm one of those perverse students myself who'll do anything rather than settling down to finish the bloody thing. Like posting to MELE #). Actually, another hour and it'll be finished.
Sure your TP will go fine, GOOD LUCK!
DC Cat
Enrico C enric...@spamcop.net
Django Cat | misc.education.language.english in <> Agreed.
Of course! :)
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Enrico C ~ No native speaker
Mxsmanic mxsma...@hotmail.com
I finally did that. She said to just drill students from the tape, if I didn't feel confident about reproducing the intonations myself.
The lesson went okay. I _can_ hear the differences, but to my American-speaking mind, the differences have absolutely no semantic significance--neither seems any more or less polite than the other, and I personally would use neither intonation, but instead a relatively simple, rising intonation for both cases.
Is there no stress in Finnish? I had a Finnish friend once, long ago, but I don't remember how she spoke.
I had tremendous trouble with repositioning the c***ette today, since I had to move back and forth over individual sentences.
I don't understand why language schools are not using CDs. It has only been 26 years, after all.
Well, the tutor was happy with the lesson, and seemed mostly concerned about my clumsy handling of the tape.
Perhaps non-native speakers are simply more careful to articulate. I'm told by students that when speaking normally (and not teaching), I'm a nightmare to understand, with extremely rapid speech.
Isn't a term paper something you work on far in advance?
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Django Cat nos...@absolutelynospam.com
Great!
However good a course book is, there are times when you just can't see what the author is getting at. Which is better than *knowing* they're *wrong*, which also happens...
It's in the ear of the beholder. I suspect Finns would describe their speech as full of subtle inflections. It can go the other way to English speaker ears, with speakers of tone-based East Asian languages appearing to have intonation which shoots about all over the shop.
Just a question of practice. The cue buttons on Tandberg machines and others specifically made for the language cl***room make life a lot easier.
You just press the button and listen as the tape rewinds at speed.
Good point. I don't know either.
No, it's not that. This actually came out of a conversation with a group of students I was teaching in Italy last year - I think it's interesting that Enrico (ciao Enrico) picked up on this. Their theory was that L2 learners have a more restricted vocabulary and so are easier to understand than L1 speakers who can draw on the full palete. All of this group were business people who travelled a lot, and they were vehmenent that they'd rather talk in English to someone from Russia or Japan than Britain or America. There may also be an element in this of feeling at a natural disadvantage to L1 speakers (God forbid we should ever try and learn anybody else's language). I also think this may be cultural, and possibly a popular opinion in Italy, while, for example, the idea that BrE is easier to understand than AmE, is popular in France.
Good for you. I make an absolute point of *not* modifying my language when talking to students *outside* the cl***room. Anything else is not only the way madness lies but leads to you sounding a total dork when you get back home.
Actually, you've caught me out... In common with many UK Universities, mine has moved recently to a US-like semester based system - at the end of each semester you have to produce several substantial pieces of work. Aren't these term papers?
Anyway, glad to hear the session went well, stay in touch.
DCC Now avoiding tomorrow's lesson prep.
Mxsmanic mxsma...@hotmail.com
I think our machines are just ordinary machines. They have a tape counter, but that's about it.
It should even be possible to copy c***ettes to CDs today and then arrange index points on the CDs to facilitate use of the recordings, if the originals are only on c***ette. Why aren't teachers doing this?
Why are schools always so far behind the times?
I do believe that one should not pander too much to the weaknesses of students in listening, otherwise they will never improve. I've been instructed to slow down and "grade" my language, but I've only done what is necessary to be understood when understanding is essential--none of this highly artificial speech that some teachers use. And if I'm saying nonessential things, like simple conversation, I am even more normal in my speech. They have to hear fast, real-world speech eventually, don't they? And my speech is the acid test: if they can understand me at the speed that I normally speak, they are doing well indeed. I've been flamed by interpreters in the past for speaking too fast to follow; they even proved their point by clocking me during a presentation once.
I guess so. But a semester is a lot longer than 19 hours, so why did you have only 19 hours to do your paper?
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Enrico C enric...@spamcop.net
Django Cat | misc.education.language.english in <> Yep! And L2 students speak more slowly too!
Then, if their first mother tongue is a Latin language, the sounds they utter are usually more comprehensible to me (I'm from Italy, you know) and the pronunciation more predictable, even when it's wrong :) Dunno. I find that BBC World Service speakers and some British actors are easy to catch. For instance, the British film "Love Actually" has been a piece of cake for me :) But, when it comes to common talk, TV series, and the stuff, I think Americans have an advantage in that they utter the whole word in a more uniform way, while the British stress a part of it and leave the rest, so to speak :))
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Enrico C Have fun!
http://www.foulds2000.freeserve.co.uk/economists.htm
bayta ...@aol.com (Baytalon)
I would say it depends on whether or not there is an intonation distinction in the native language of your speakers. If they are accustomed to such a distinction, you might try to note it via the tapes, but you might also point out that such a distinction is not a part of vernacular American English.
Mxsmanic mxsma...@hotmail.com
Amazingly, a subsequent lesson dealt with detecting _sarcasm_ in intonation! Given that native speakers routinely ask "are you being sarcastic?" it seems ridiculous to propose a lesson in detecting sarcasm by intonation alone. The whole idea of sarcasm, after all, is to conceal the fact that it is sarcasm. Truly some people are absolutely hellbent on presenting mere intonation as an essential component of the language.
Frankly, if someone gets the phonemes and stress correct in English, I can understand him or her just fine. The intonation doesn't matter, and it is highly variable from one group to another, anyway.
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Django Cat nos...@absolutelynospam.com
But *somebody* has to know you're being sarcastic don't they, even if it is isn't the person the sarcasm is aimed at. So how are you going signal this?
I suppose you could try:-
"Excuse me? Could I have your attention please? Thank you at the back there. Right. I'm going to start being sarcastic now..." (clears throat) Since this has come up again, I happened to pick up a copy of 'International Express' today - you hadn't mentioned it's a Business English text, and that may be significant. I'm yet to find the bit about sarcasm, it seems a strange thing to want to teach... I can't imagine your French students having any problems at all with picking up the intonation patterns, given that their own language uses intonation in much the same way as English does. However, Taylor may have in mind the large numbers of students from countries such as Japan who take Business English courses. In such students' typical speech, inappropriate stress within intonation can lead to speakers sounding rude to L1 English speakers - this is the sort of thing that Business English course writers worry about because they're envisaging international contacts at a formal level. Many speakers of oriental languages tend to put a single heavy stress on one (wrong) syllable, which can sound weird:-
' "Could you be*gin*, James?" We're talking about the material on page 35, yes? - (~slight rising intonation on 'yes'~). I haven't heard the tape yet - I can only ***ume that if you can't pick up what's going on, the tape hasn't been that well put together and the two pairs of utterances don't sound different enough.
"Pff! Vocabulary! Who needs it?" (see above for sacastic intonation).
Moving the tonal centre - or centres - around an utterance is a fundamental part of pronunciation, and pronuniciation is fundamental to understanding speech. At its basic level it's an essential way of marking the difference between a spoken question and a statement, and we all use intonation to load the same lexical material with every supralexical message from aggression to obsequiousness, with sarcasm significantly there on the way. One of the factors that language loses when it's written down is this sort of extra loading.
And this is something that occurs in all world Englishes, it's a basic phenomenon of the global language, not some funny little quirk of British English. If you truly think this doesn't happen in American English, I strongly suggest you start by checking out the brilliant scene in 'Donnie Brasco' where Johnny Depp's character explains how moving the intonation around in the simple phrase 'Forget about it' makes it mean half a dozen different things.
But it's not just about *you* understanding students, is it? After all, as you develop as a teacher you'll find you can understand mangled English other L1 speakers won't make head or tail of, and this process has already started.
Providing an accurate model of pronunciation and developing an understanding of what's happening is an important part of the EFL teacher's repertoire, though it can be challenging for new teachers - you may want to kick things around with your tutor about it a little further. I think you may be getting confused over stress and intonation - word and segmental stress are parts of the complex process of intonation, although they're not the whole story.
Cheers DCC
Mxsmanic mxsma...@hotmail.com
You may know. It's not necessary that anyone hearing you know. You may even be sarcastic in a tone that deliberately conceals the sarcasm.
Overall, it's like arguing about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.
I didn't know that it was.
_I_ could not recognize the intonations, and English is my native language.
I think the problem is that these intonations are far more specific to British English than Taylor might like to believe. While I can hear differences in intonation when they are presented side by side, I do not ***ociate any difference in meaning with the difference in intonation.
British intonation sounds very sing-song to American ears, but that creates only an impression of novelty, not differences in meaning.
I've heard English made unintelligible by misplaced _stress_ and by mispronounced _phonemes_, but I don't recall ever hearing English made incomprehensible by a variation in intonation alone. Perhaps Chinese speakers could change it enough to get in the way of understanding, but for European speakers, I've yet to hear an example.
American intonation is pretty flat; I suggest to ESL students to just imitate that flatness. It works for Americans, and it doesn't seem to cause a problem with other English speakers, so why not do things the easy way?
So how do Australians (and some other English speakers who have the same rising intonation on everything) manage it?
My advice to ESL students here, though, would be to just structure questions as questions, rather than depending on intonation to turn a statement into a question.
It seems counterproductive to teach supralexical meanings to students who haven't even got the basics down yet. That's like teaching the fine points of an end game in chess to someone who hasn't yet learned how all the pieces move.
I'd say, in fact, that if they are sufficiently proficient in English to make intonation important, they don't need a teacher anymore.
It still seems to be very flexible for communication in writing, though.
I don't hear it, and neither do any of my other American acquaintances.
Only the British hear it, and only the British attach semantic significance to it. Furthermore, the sources I dug up concurred that these intonational nuances are not meaningful to Americans. Presumably other speakers of English are even less aware of the differences, and this would include native speakers from some other parts of the world, such as Australia.
To the average American, "forget about it" means only "forget about it." The intonations described by Brasco are very specific to gangster talk, just as the intonations under discussion here appear to be specific to British English.
Everyone understands them. Stress is critical, intonation is not.
Teaching students to hear or make distinctions that are ignored by 99% of English speakers is not productive with any but the most advanced students.
To the extent that stress is intonation, intonation is important. But intonation outside of stress is largely irrelevant.
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Django Cat nos...@absolutelynospam.com
Is it? In New York it certainly isn't, maybe you're projecting you own regional speech pattern onto the entire US speech community.
Why? Are they all going to live in America? Or only ever speak to Americans? US English does *not* provide a world standard English speech norm, especially in Europe, but also in most of the rest of the world apart from, possibly, the Far East. I'm not saying that for any sociopolitical reasons either, it's just the way it is. Your students will end up picking up your speech traits anyway, and it won't hurt to suggest they imitate your speech, but they will need to be exposed to a varity of models.
Possibly. So are you planning to spend your career teaching beginners? It gets very boring very quickly.
What *is* a debatable point is how much something like intonation is actually teachable, and how much speakers of differing languages will pick it up and/or superimpose their own system on it anyway. It's possibly a bit like management trainers attempting to teach 'body language' - once you're aware you're doing it, you can't do it any more.
How do you know? Which everyone? Your fellow trainee cohort? Are your fellow students generally as good French speakers as yourself (cf fr.lettres.anglaise), whose own knowledge of French automatically sensitizes them to the typical speech patterns of French speakers speaking English? Will non-teachers understand these students easily? Other L2 speakers?
Your French students are using an intonation typical to Western European languages anyway, which makes them easier for you to understand, they aren't using the totally flat intonation you seem to believe in.
Which particular sources would these be then?
Anyway, look, fine, have it your own way, pronunciation is a tricky thing to teach and it's probably a good idea to get some teaching under your belt and reflect on how the phonological system works as you get more experienced. Nobody said this stuff was easy.
Just three ideas:-
* try some action research - suggest to a range of English speakers (L1 & L2, Americans and Brits - if you actually know any) they say some sentences in a variety of different ways - angry, sad, outraged, pitiful, or even some wacky character ones - punk, opera, preacher, judge, gangster - but don't mention the word 'intonation' or explain why you want them to do it beforehand. Ask yourself what makes the difference.
* do be aware of your own intonation. Saying 'can I have a beer please?' with the wrong intonation makes the difference between a polite request and an aggressive demand. And that's true from Glasgow to Sydney and from Singapore to Des Moines. But as a native speaker your internal language monitor looks after this for you anyway, so it's not really something you need to worry too much about.
* new teachers are often surprised at the fact that their students know more about the mechanics of the language than they do themselves. Telling a cl*** who've been learning about a language a lot longer than you've been teaching it something silly like: may cause you to lose credibilty (or 'look a complete prat' as we say in the trade).
Good luck with your students DCC
Mxsmanic mxsma...@hotmail.com
New York accents are dramatic departures from the American norm.
I don't have a regional speech pattern. The American English of the southwestern U.S. is extremely neutral, very much like English in much of the Midwest. There are relatively few places outside the southern U.S. with obvious regional accents. Americans are much more mobile than Europeans and regional accents rarely have a chance to develop.
Because a flat intonation is easy to manage, and it won't interfere with comprehension.
They don't have to. Every native English speaker in the world can understand a standard American pronunciation, so an ESL student adopting it is not at any disadvantage, and the flat intonation is straightforward.
I only suggest that intonation be simple, if it is taught at all.
American intonation is somewhat simpler than British intonation. And it is better to pronounce as 300 million people do than as 16 million people do, overall.
It's well and good to expose them to many models and I advocate that also, but there is no need for them to try to imitate minor details of intonation in those models, nor do they really need to recognize those details.
If they are far enough along to worry about details of British intonation, they don't need a teacher anymore.
Body language instruction is largely a waste of time, too, since it varies so much from group to group and occasionally from individual to individual. Few principles are universal enough to be worth teaching.
Because everyone understands me, with the same intonation. Intonation is not an obstacle to comprehension in English, as long as the stress is right.
The students I teach are normally French native speakers.
They can understand people speaking English with thick French accents much more easily than can other English speakers, for obvious reasons.
But it's not the intonation that is significant in that case, it's malformed phonemes and bad stress.
Once they get their phonemes and stress right, yes.
French intonation is essentially flat.
I didn't write them down, I just looked them up.
Intonation, no doubt. But the idea behind ESL is not to teach people to imitate gangsters or punks, it's to teach them how to communicate in English.
Not in American English. The intonation is normally flat with a slight rise at the end. No special distinction is made for politeness.
It's not true in American English.
The monitor model. Hmm ... I had forgotten all about that.
I studied French for several decades; the area of intonation and differences between English and French are not at all new to me. That's one reason why I'm convinced it doesn't make any difference.
I believe in teaching students what they need to know to communicate.
For example, with French students of English, I'll teach them to pronounce 'th' correctly, because they have to be able to do that; but teaching them to pronounce 'r' correctly is optional, as it matters very little to communication.
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Django Cat nos...@absolutelynospam.com
This is fun, isn't it? It's late here, so just a few points.
Every speaker of every variety of every language on Earth thinks their speech pattern is 'neutral'. A brief anecdote:-
A few years ago my late - and slightly eccentric - elderly mother went into a bank in San Francisco. The bank clerk gave her a big grin and said 'love your accent maam' to which she replied "Oh no, I haven't got an accent. It's you who's got the accent." The bank clerk, with admirable grace, laughed and replied:-
"Well, maam, I guess I have." We all like to believe that our variety of English pronunciation is the bog standard, non-inflected basic model. Americans think BrE = their norm + clipped and - what was it you said? - sing-song intonation, we think AmE = our norm + drawl. The fact is, there are no norms.
And it lacks a lot of clues about what the speaker means, loses potential richness of communication and so impedes understanding. You said earlier that your French students say BrE is easier to understand, despite your efforts to flatten their speech tones. Why do you think they think that, especially as the whole of the planet is supposed to be so tuned in to US English?
Can they? Why? I've just spent the afternoon with a cl*** of students from the People's Republic of China. They won't have been brought up on Hollywood Movies and there's no reason to think they'll understand you any better than me. That's a couple of hundred million people and counting.
OK, granted.
The relative sizes of population in the US and UK don't have a bearing on International English usage, and most L2 learners want to speak English to travel internationallly and speak to other L2 learners, not visit L1 teritories. I'm not saying for one instant that BrE represents a world norm any more than US English does, although it's the prefered norm in, for example, the Indian subcontinent - whoops, there go another 100 million or so. What is happening is that a number of world Englishes are emerging (see the work of Crystal on this) which draw on elements of BrE, AmE, Indian English and others. You impiled only 1% of speakers are native speakers of BrE - it's more likely .001%, but that doesn't mean the other 99.999% use American forms despite the world's taste for US movies and music. We touched on Australian English's (AuE?) rising intonation in statements - that's a definite charateristic of a variety of World English that could be called 'traveller (or even backpacker) English.' It is just conceivable that AmE is the provincial aberation in this, and the rest of the world uses an intonation model similar to that used in the UK.
Yeah, sorry, bad phrasing on my part. We're not talking Big Stevie Krashen here. 'Language mechanism' would have been a better way to put it.
Are you sure we're even talking about the same language feature here, because I'm beginning to have grave doubts? French intonation is flat? What part of the country are you actually in? Somewhere up on the Belgian border? Even so...
So do we all.
Saying 'zat', rather than 'that' is one of those little straws that eventually breaks the camel's back of comprehension - like getting the intonation wrong.
I'm intrigued - can you tell us some more?
Sante Django Chat
Mxsmanic mxsma...@hotmail.com
Some of them are right. People living in certain parts of the Midwest (outside a few areas with marked regional accents) speak a very neutral, "broadcast" American English. The same is true for people living in the American Southwest and a few other areas. People from these regions do not appear to have accents to any other speakers of American English; they speak the language just as the television does, and television pronunciation is deliberately neutral.
See above.
There are a zillion varieties of British English, thanks to centuries of immobility in many areas of the U.K. that allowed regional accents to develop. Many areas of the U.S. have never been this static, and so regional accents have never developed. The areas that _have_ been static have accents, including many metropolitan areas, such as New York City or Boston. But nowadays even people in these major cities often speak a very neutral English, since many of them are not natives or have moved around enough to never acquire an accent.
Since the clues are reliable only for a tiny subset of the world's English speakers, they are not useful to ESL students. Trying to read clues that aren't what you expect them to be can have worse results than just ignoring them.
ESL students do not wish to rival Churchill in eloquence, they simply wish to communicate. They need to learn English in a way that allows them to communicate with all English speakers with more or less equal facility and efficiency. Learning the intonational idiosyncrasy of a tiny community of English speakers is not conducive to this.
Many do say this, although I've found a few who say the opposite.
In talking with other teachers and trainees, we've speculated that they are imagining it, since they cannot explain their belief, and it varies from one student to another, and it doesn't appear to hold true when we actually test them.
American English and British English share the same phonemic base, making both mutually and externally comprehensible to an equal degree.
Regional variants on these may be incomprehensible, though. Australian English is slightly different from both (rather closer to BrE), but remains in the mainstream of English pronunciation.
Virtually no one in China is fluent in English. Of those who are, virtually none is fluent enough to know or care about minor variations in intonation.
The relative economics do, however. Often these days people worldwide will be dealing with Americans, not people from the U.K. If they must have a preference, American English may be the more practical one. Of course, if they are fluent, it doesn't matter, anyway.
In that case, the differences between AmE and BrE are completely irrelevant, as they are far beyond the English competence of most ESL students to begin with.
It is just conceivable that the provincialism resides in worrying about intonation to begin with. It's not important in English, and unless one has run out of other things to teach extraordinarily advanced ESL students, there's no reason to teach it (and if one does teach it, there arises the thorny question of _which_ of hundreds of intonations to teach).
In any case, my memory of those theories is very poor. It did briefly jog a recollection or two, though.
Intonation = mainly pitch in this discussion.
Yes, with typically only a slight rise at the end of a phrase, if anything. Semantically speaking, of course.
Paris I think it is _far_ more serious than problems with intonation. There are zillions (thillions?) of pairs that can no longer be distinguished if you don't have that sound down pat. I'm surprised that so few teachers work on it, because it's not fundamentally difficult for students if you instruct them carefully (mere imitation generally isn't enough), and they really need to know how to do it.
Intonation, in contrast, is largely irrelevant. Whether they raise or lower their voice at the end of a phrase, it will be understood. I can still understand Australians even if they raise their pitch at the end of every single phrase.
Most French students of English will pronounce a French, uvular 'r' in speaking English. While this is not the correct pronunciation of the 'r', it's a sound that doesn't exist in English, so no confusion with any other English sound is possible. Native speakers readily recognize the uvular 'r' as a variant on the retroflex 'r', so comprehension is generally unaffected. Pronouncing with a uvular 'r' will give a student an obvious French accent, but it won't make him significantly more difficult to understand. The 'th' sound, in contrast, appears in many minimal pairs and will cause errors in comprehension if it is not rendered correctly. In other words, you have to teach phonemes that are common in minimal pairs preferentially. Phonemes that rarely form such pairs are far less critical. The 'r' sound in both English and French is so unique that you can interchange one with the other in either language without causing a problem in comprehension; a trilled Spanish 'r' works fine, too. I worry about the 'r' only when teaching students to eliminate their accents, not when teaching them to be understood.
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Transpose hotmail and mxsmanic in my e-mail address to reach me directly.
Enrico C enric...@spamcop.net
Mxsmanic | misc.education.language.english in I see what you mean.
Like the Spanish waiter in "Fawlty Towes" :)) Funny but comprehensible, after all.
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Enrico C - L2 speaker "The fad of today is the orthodoxy of tomorrow."
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