AD+-+RANALLI

Ranalli´s text present some good ideas on teaching ESL pronunciation. He emphasizes that teachers and learners need to maintain realistic goals when addressing intonation, as it is particularly difficult to be dealt in classroom. Some interesting fragments are listed below:

1. Why is intonaion importan?

(p3) Intonation choices made by speakers carry linguistic information and the various elements of intonation are seen to perform a variety of functions.

**Roach** suggests that reports of miscommunication are overestimated, and that when nonstandard English creates misunderstanding or causes offence, the root of the problem is on “very few occasions” found to be intonation (1991: 168).

Many would disagree, however. **Pickering (2001), Clennel (1997) and Wennerstrom (1994),** all working in ESL environments, cite research and anecdotal data showing the problems that intonational 3 miscues can cause between native- and non-native speakers.

**Clennel** (1997: 118). 1. The prepositional content (essential information) of the message may not be fully grasped. 2. The illocutionary force (pragmatic meaning) of utterances may be misunderstood. 3. Interspeaker cooperation and conversational management may be poorly controlled

**Jenkins** (2002: 87) mistakes of prominence or “nuclear stress” are one category of phonological error which can cause breakdowns in communication.

2. Pedagogical Aspects **Dalton and Seidlhofer** (1994: 73) “particularly important in discourse … at the same time they are particularly difficult to teach”

3. Rules and generalizations Learners are offered no rules about intonation choices. Rather, they are encouraged to acquire appropriate intonation patterns through exposure to authentic or quasi-authentic listening materials, and practice activities such as listen-and-repeat or language awareness tasks (**Thompson**, 1995: 236).

For example, in the upper-intermediate book, learners must listen to dialogues of people greeting each other and indicate whether they sound neutral or disinterested, friendly and interested, or “excited and very pleased to see each other” (1999: 8).

5. Discussion and argument

Underhill has proposed three principles for teaching intonation. “Ideally,” he writes what we are after is a system that:

• Is learnable; • Accounts for what native speakers do and don’t do; • Has a limited set of rules that enables learners to develop valid generalizations on which to base their own interpretation and production (1994: 3).

6. Prominence **Jenkins** has noted how “learners seem to acquire [prominence] relatively quickly for receptive purposes but do not acquire it productively until considerably later, if at all” (1998: 122).