Abstract
This article investigates the pragmatics of intonation in teacher talk in a pre-school spoken corpus of EFL (UAM-Corpus). First, a descriptive analysis (Halliday, Intonation and grammar in British English. Mouton, The Hague, 1967; Halliday, A Course in spoken English: intonation. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1970) presents the prosodic realisations of native vs. non-native EFL teachers’ discourse. Second, the investigation unveils the multifunctionality of prosody within and across both pedagogical contexts (native and non-native teachers) to evaluate the relationship between the communicative functions displayed in the classroom and the prosodic choices. And third, the study suggests some pedagogical implications in language teaching considering the qualitative and statistical findings: there is a correlation between the display of a communicative function and its prosodic realisation in both contexts but both groups of teachers exploit intonation differently.
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- 1.
The “tone group” (Palmer 1922; Armstrong and Ward 1926; O’Connor and Arnold 1961; Brazil 1975), “rhythm unit” (Pike 1945), “tone unit” (Halliday 1967; Crystal 1969), “intonation unit” (Chafe 1987), “intonation group” (Cruttenden 1997) or “pitch sequence” (Brazil 1975) are many of the terms encountered in the literature when referring to the division of speech into workable operationalisation of speech.
- 2.
cf. Riesco-Bernier (2003) for a full account of the intonation system.
- 3.
Both groups displayed the same variety of prosodic choice in the remaining 56% of the cases.
- 4.
We shall refer to “communicative value” in this section as the degree of association between the interaction “communicative function” and “prosodic realisation”.
- 5.
Cf. Riesco-Bernier (2003) for a comprehensive analysis of the pitch height in relation to the communicative functions.
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Riesco-Bernier, S. (2012). Same but Different: The Pragmatic Potential of Native vs. Non-native Teachers’ Intonation in the EFL Classroom. In: Romero-Trillo, J. (eds) Pragmatics and Prosody in English Language Teaching. Educational Linguistics, vol 15. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-3883-6_11
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