Effect Of Consciousness-raising Of Intonational Features On The Improvement Of ESL Learners’Intonation

Intonation is an essential factor in oral interaction. It directly influences theintelligibility of the L2language production. So its quality is an important issue in ESLteaching and learning. The present study narrowed the research focus onto the pitchfactor in prosodic features.In order to improve the quality of ESL learners’ intonation, a designedconsciousness-raising approach was adopted in the present intervention experimentwhich lasted for more than two months. Twelve postgraduate students from School ofForeign Studies, Jiangsu Normal University were called upon to act as the subjects.And they had two two-hour class sessions during the whole intervention procedure. Inthe two class sessions, a series of practices which included trainings on stress andintonation aspects were conducted to raise the subjects’ consciousness of the pitchapplication and to further improve their intonation quality. After the intervention, theanalysis was mainly focused upon the following three aspects:(1) the problems inpitch use among the ESL learners;(2) the nuclear stress in sentences;(3) the pitchrange variation in multi-lexical-words phrases.After the data analysis, it can be found that the quality of ESL learners’ intonationhave been improved through the training.(1) the consciousness of the nuclear stresshas been improved. The experiment results showed that82%of the sentences havenuclear stress before the intervention, while all the100%sentences have nuclear stressafter the intervention. It indicates that the consciousness of the nuclear stress has beenimproved;(2) the placement of the nuclear stress has been improved. At the beginningof the experiment, the present study summarized the common problems in pitch useamong the ESL learners by observing the placement of nuclear stress. The problemsincluded falling the nuclear stress on the last word, lacking stress in sentences, andstressing on too many words in a sentence. However, after the training, the experiment results exhibited that all the placements of nuclear stress in the five sentences had beenchanged except the second intonation group in Sentence5. Moreover, it has beentaught to the learners that the context played the key role in the placement of thenuclear stress which usually falls upon the content words, such as noun, verb, adjective,and adverb. The changed stress identifies that the placement of the nuclear stress hasbeen improved;(3) the variation of pitch range in multi-lexical-words phrases has beenimproved. A large amount of data in experiment identified that the pitch range in65%of the multi-lexical-words phrases has been expanded. It means that the intonation inthose65%sentences were not as level as before. Most of the subjects’ intonationbecame better than before. It can be seen that the variation of the pitch range has alsobeen improved. All the improvement proved that the consciousness-raising approachwas effective for the improvement of the quality of ESL learners’ intonation.