AD+-+Point+of+View

a) What is your point of view? We believe teaching intonation is necessary but difficult for both sides, teacher and students. A great number of teachers are not prepared to teach it, as they are also not native speakers. Students, besides this fact, are still learning other aspects of the language that they consider more important. Another problem related to intonation teaching is which approach should be used. As this is not a very explored area, there aren't a lot of materials available.  Teaching intonation is very important, since the wrong intonation could lead the hearer to not pay attention to speaker's message.Teachers have to make efforts to learn the right information and the different approaches to teach it. As Celse-Murcia exposed, we can use different estrategies to deal with intonation in class-room. Learner's goals have to be considered, so that the teacher can plan the classes accordingly. We have to be careful to not put more emphasis in intonation than in 4 skills or grammar. According to Chun, in relation to teaching and learning English, intonation has a very small role and it only appears in more advanced levels. After considering the importance of this feature and respecting the learner's objectives, we believe that more attention should be given to intonation.

b) Who do you agree or disagree with? I agree with Ufomata's opinion that teachers should be better prepared and the textbooks related to pronunciation should be more used. I also agree with Underhill’s (Rannali) three principles for teaching (it is learnable; accounts for what native speakers do and don’t do; has a limited set of rules). The only idea I didn’t totally agree is **T**hompson’s idea (Rannali) which says learners are offered no rules about intonation choices. Rather, they are encouraged to acquire appropriate intonation patterns through exposure to authentic material. In my opinion, the weaker learners need rules otherwise they will feel completely lost.

c) How can you complement what has already been written? I can gather all the different writers’ positions on why teaching intonation is important and make the learning more meaningful. In order to make students more interested in the subject, teachers should emphasize the communication problems arose by a deficient intonation.

d) Do you have any new ideas? Even though intonation is an important aspect in English teaching, I think it should not be the main goal. With the globalization more and more people with different native languages need to communicate and English is almost always the language used. Therefore native speakers are getting used to listening to different intonation and comprehensions is not affected as it used to be before.