 | This article possibly contains original research .(September 2024) |
Prosody is an essential part of spoken language, and learners need often need help to perceive and produce the prosody of a new language. Prosody is, today, undertaught. [1] The improvement of prosody teaching is an active research area.
While all languages have prosody, they differ in their inventories of prosodic patterns and in what these patterns convey.
The use of proper prosody can increase intelligibility, make it easier for listeners to understand the speaker. This is true across languages. In English, word stress is less important than tone in Mandarin, but is still essential for full intelligibility. The use of proper prosody also affects listeners’ judgments of proficiency, and competence. One study showed that 35-41% of English proficiency judgments in classroom presentations were explained by prosody quality, [2] notably including the accuracy of word stress placement and the use of a wide pitch range.
Prosody also contributes to communicative effectiveness, especially in dialog situations. [3] Learners need prosodic skills in order to: track what is being said and its social meaning, effectively express their own feelings and intentions, execute social actions such as offering, apologizing, and praising, and, often, to be accepted. In a seminal study [4] Gumperz observed a group of cafeteria workers from South Asia who had been called out, by their British customers, for being disrespectful. Gumperz noticed that the way they offered side dishes, with a falling intonation, gravy>, conveyed, to the English speakers, a message of “take it or leave it, I don’t care”. The workers had no such intention, as falling intonation was a polite and proper way to make an offer in their native language. Neither group was consciously aware of the difference. This illustrates how misperceptions of prosody, with its powerful interpersonal functions, can cause mere language differences to be attributed to bad attitudes and improper intents, especially in cross-cultural situations.
Native speakers’ prosodic ability levels vary widely. Even adept speakers may feel inadequate in high-stakes situations, such as public speaking, and may turn to coaching to project more charisma. People may also seek help with interviewing skills and with active listening and other skills that are important in business and relationships. [5] Many autistic speakers have a limited ability to perceive and use prosody, especially for pragmatic and interpersonal functions, [6] and may benefit from prosody training.
There is no recipe for teaching prosody, but the following aspects often need attention.
In spoken language analysis, an utterance is a continuous piece of speech, by one person, before or after which there is silence on the part of the person. In the case of oral languages, it is generally, but not always, bounded by silence. Utterances do not exist in written language; only their representations do. They can be represented and delineated in written language in many ways.
Language education – the process and practice of teaching a second or foreign language – is primarily a branch of applied linguistics, but can be an interdisciplinary field. There are four main learning categories for language education: communicative competencies, proficiencies, cross-cultural experiences, and multiple literacies.
Listening is the act of paying attention to sounds. It includes listening to the sounds of nature, listening to music, and perhaps most importantly, interpersonal listening, i.e. listening to other human beings. When listening to another person, one hears what they are saying and tries to understand what it means.
In sociolinguistics, an accent is a way of pronouncing a language that is distinctive to a country, area, social class, or individual. An accent may be identified with the locality in which its speakers reside, the socioeconomic status of its speakers, their ethnicity, their caste or social class, or influence from their first language.
Communicative language teaching (CLT), or the communicative approach (CA), is an approach to language teaching that emphasizes interaction as both the means and the ultimate goal of study.
In linguistics, prosody is the study of elements of speech that are not individual phonetic segments but which are properties of syllables and larger units of speech, including linguistic functions such as intonation, stress, and rhythm. Such elements are known as suprasegmentals.
In linguistics, intonation is the variation in pitch used to indicate the speaker's attitudes and emotions, to highlight or focus an expression, to signal the illocutionary act performed by a sentence, or to regulate the flow of discourse. For example, the English question "Does Maria speak Spanish or French?" is interpreted as a yes-or-no question when it is uttered with a single rising intonation contour, but is interpreted as an alternative question when uttered with a rising contour on "Spanish" and a falling contour on "French". Although intonation is primarily a matter of pitch variation, its effects almost always work hand-in-hand with other prosodic features. Intonation is distinct from tone, the phenomenon where pitch is used to distinguish words or to mark grammatical features.
Automatic pronunciation assessment is the use of speech recognition to verify the correctness of pronounced speech, as distinguished from manual assessment by an instructor or proctor. Also called speech verification, pronunciation evaluation, and pronunciation scoring, the main application of this technology is computer-aided pronunciation teaching (CAPT) when combined with computer-aided instruction for computer-assisted language learning (CALL), speech remediation, or accent reduction.
Accent reduction, also known as accent modification or accent neutralization, is a systematic approach for learning or adopting a new speech accent. It is the process of learning the sound system and melodic intonation of a language so the non-native speaker can communicate with clarity.
Language teaching, like other educational activities, may employ specialized vocabulary and word use. This list is a glossary for English language learning and teaching using the communicative approach.
The phonology of second languages is different from the phonology of first languages in various ways. The differences are considered to come from general characteristics of second languages, such as slower speech rate, lower proficiency than native speakers, and from the interaction between non-native speakers' first and second languages.
English as a lingua franca (ELF) is the use of the English language "as a global means of inter-community communication" and can be understood as "any use of English among speakers of different first languages for whom English is the communicative medium of choice and often the only option". ELF is "defined functionally by its use in intercultural communication rather than formally by its reference to native-speaker norms" whereas English as a second or foreign language aims at meeting native speaker norms and gives prominence to native-speaker cultural aspects. While lingua francas have been used for centuries, what makes ELF a novel phenomenon is the extent to which it is used in spoken, written and computer-mediated communication. ELF research focuses on the pragmatics of variation which is manifest in the variable use of the resources of English for a wide range of globalized purposes, in important formal encounters such as business transactions, international diplomacy and conflict resolution, as well as in informal exchanges between international friends.
Interactional sociolinguistics is a subdiscipline of linguistics that uses discourse analysis to study how language users create meaning via social interaction. It is one of the ways in which linguists look at the intersections of human language and human society; other subfields that take this perspective are language planning, minority language studies, quantitative sociolinguistics, and sociohistorical linguistics, among others. Interactional sociolinguistics is a theoretical and methodological framework within the discipline of linguistic anthropology, which combines the methodology of linguistics with the cultural consideration of anthropology in order to understand how the use of language informs social and cultural interaction. Interactional sociolinguistics was founded by linguistic anthropologist John J. Gumperz. Topics that might benefit from an Interactional sociolinguistic analysis include: cross-cultural miscommunication, politeness, and framing.
Contextualization in sociolinguistics refers to the use of language to signal relevant aspects of an interaction or communicative situation. This may include clues to who is talking, their relationship, where the conversation is occurring, and much more. These clues can be drawn from how the language is being used, what type of language is being used, and the participants tone of voice. Contextualization includes verbal and non-verbal clues of things such as the power dynamic or the situation apparent from a conversation being analyzed or participated in. These clues are referred to as "contextualization cues". Contextualization cues are both verbal and non-verbal signs that language speakers use and language listeners hear that give clues into relationships, the situation, and the environment of the conversation. An example of contextualization in academia is the work of Basil Bernstein. Bernstein describes the contextualization of scientific knowledge in pedagogical contexts, such as textbooks.
Language pedagogy is the discipline concerned with the theories and techniques of teaching language. It has been described as a type of teaching wherein the teacher draws from their own prior knowledge and actual experience in teaching language. The approach is distinguished from research-based methodologies.
Language power (LP) is a measure of the ability to communicate effectively in a given language, specifically one that is not native to the speaker.
Lyric setting is the process in songwriting of placing textual content (lyrics) in the context of musical rhythm, in which the lyrical meter and musical rhythm are in proper alignment as to preserve the natural shape of the language and promote prosody.
The Lingua Franca Core (LFC) is a selection of pronunciation features of the English language recommended as a basis in teaching of English as a lingua franca. It was proposed by linguist Jennifer Jenkins in her 2000 book The Phonology of English as an International Language. Jenkins derived the LFC from features found to be crucial in non-native speakers' understanding of each other, and advocated that teachers focus on those features and regard deviations from other native features not as errors but as acceptable variations. The proposal sparked a debate among linguists and pedagogists, while Jenkins contended that much of the criticism was based on misinterpretations of her proposal.
The Common European Framework of Reference for Languages: Learning, Teaching, Assessment (CEFR) Companion Volume is an extension and update of the original CEFR, first published in 2001. The CEFR provides a standardized way of describing language proficiency levels. It is widely used in language education and assessment globally.
Prosody is important in English. It conveys many pragmatic functions relating to speech acts, attitude, turn-taking, topic structure, information structure and more. It also helps mark lexical identity, grammatical structure, semantic elements, and more.