AD+-+CHUN

I found some interesting and important ideas from a text called "The neglected role of intonation in communicative competence and proficiency" written by Dorothy M. Chun. I think this text will be helpful mainly in relation to the part that we want to explain why teaching intonation is important.

In the first part of the text Chun states that intonation has been overlooked by the linguists and theorists despite the fact that it is fundamental to language communication and that it is "powerful tool for negotiating meaning, managing interaction, and achieving discourse coherence".


 * Interactional nature of language competence

- Specifying what is grammatically accepted is not enough to discuss language competency of speakers

- it is important to consider the social situation and the effect of an utterance on the interlocutor, the interaction between two speakers

- “Syntactic and pragmatic analysis does not suffice to account for complex transactions in conversation, and the role of accent, stress and pitch in conversation emerges as crucial to this interactional analysis of language.”

- when the hearer’s role was taken into account in the analysis of discourse a new subfield was opened in conversational analysis.


 * Intonation and discourse

In this part of the text different perspectives in relation to the study of discourse and intonation are presented. In addition to that, there is a figure with 8 functions of intonation divided into intrasentencial functions (accent, distinguish syntactic types, express emotions or attitudes and express finality or non finality) and intersentencial functions (distinguish new vs. given topic, chunk speech into units, signal interclausal cohesion, mark role relationship between interlocutors and control interactive structure of discourse). There is a brief explanation of each of these functions. Also, the author presents some linguists and which functions they defended among the ones shown.

There are many examples that illustrate the functions of intonation and its importance on the discourse. You can observe difference on the ultimate meaning of an utterance if it is pronounced with different intonation.


 * Communicative competence and proficiency models / intonation and the guidelines/ outlook

Chun explains that one of the consequences and reasons for showing the functions of intonation is to show the broader communicative value of an utterance and that intonation must be viewed as a powerful and untapped discourse tool which should be developed as part of the communicative competence of the foreign language student. Then, some examples of proficiency tests and models are presented and it is stated that the role of intonation in these models is very small. Also, the competences considered by most of these tests are described and inside the communicative competence, pronunciation and intonation have a small role. Chun affirms that intonation is mentioned only in high levels of proficiency and because of that the beginning language learner is not aware of the importance of intonation and not able to use it.

Neglecting this important feature of the language can bring bad consequences to the learner/speaker - “English has established social and intonaional cues that can potentially cause confusion between speakers, if both do not rely on the same set of cues. In particular, some of the problems that native speakers of any language have in understanding non-native speakers are possibly in the realm of "wrong" (or "foreign") intonation in sentences and not in local errors of word stress or pronunciation."

It is important to have in mind that the language learner needs not only to make her/himself understood but also to understand intonational contrasts made by native speakers and if intonation is not taught or even considered while teaching or/and learning a language, the learner is likely to have difficulties in communication.