Hi Jose,

The course you're teaching sounds really interesting! Sorry if I implied that
you were only
using O & A - I didn't mean that! I find that "tonetic" approaches are useful
for teaching
and understanding intonation, but I find them frustrating when I try to hear any
of it in
conversation. Do you include any of the 'anti-tonetic' research in your course?
By that I
mean work by people like Gillian Brown in the 1980s, and more recent stuff by
Couper-
Kuhlen, Selter, Szczepek-Reed and others. It's tricky area for teaching as
'tonetic' models
make it possible to teach, but I've got a nasty feeling that they really don't
match reality in
most circumstances. On the other hand, the more sociolinguistic descriptions
don't give
anything solid to teach.
Varieties of English also seem to have very different uses of intonation. I'm
from
Newcastle, England, originally, and the local variety there uses intensity
rather than pitch
to carry information and has the 'Northern Rise' for informing, and a fall for
questions
according to some research. How does intonation work in Argentinian Spanish? I
lived in
Spain for about 3 years, and Mexico for a similar period, and found that the use
of
intonation was very different between varieties of Spanish.
One area I'm interested in at the moment is the teaching of English intonation
for Lingua
Franca users. There doesn't seem to be much research on this.
Um, just noticed that I still haven't offered anything towards your initial
question about
the switchback and high dive! My copy of O & S is a 12 hour flight away, so
until I get a
chance to search it on the net, I'll leave that to someone else!

All the best,

Alex.



--- In iatefl_pronsig@..., jose tiziani <jmtiziani@...> wrote:
>
> Hi, Alex. Thanks for such a prompt reply.
>  
> You may have got the imporession that I use 'Intonation of Colloquial English'
at length
and almost exclusively, after reading my first message. While the value of O'C &
A's
description is undeniable, I must confess I only use a digitised version of the
tapes for
drilling practice of a few patterns (not all!). For the semantics of intonation,
and, more
particularly, TONE, I follow Brazil's in terms of 'abstract' or 'global'
meanings, but
Halliday's and Tench's more closely for local meanings. Since I work with EFL
teacher
trainees, I cannot remain at the global level in terms of tone meanings, and
feel that when
it comes to dealing actual choices in speech, students require and benefit from
more
localised explanations. I also make extensive use of a more recent and valuable
contribution by Wells which gathers the views of many intonationists, though I
feel it
focuses on local meanings mostly at the sentence-level, through largely
decontextualised
> examples, or examples that remain at the 'exhange' level, much in O'C & A's
tradition,
only to 'transfer' uses to conversation-length texts at the very end of the
book, when I've
noticed over the years that such 'magical' tranfer from isolated examples to
contextualised ones is hardly easy and/or feasible. Hewings' is great. I use it
(book/cds/cd-rom) for complementing work on TONICITY and TONE (not so much
on TONALITY, though, due to the fact that I disgree with several instances of
chunking
proposed in the relevant units).
>  
> Why RP? Well, it's a description I am familiar with, and for which I have
plenty of
recorded/analysed material. However, RP does not exhaust the range of variation
my
students are exposed to. I make frequent use of material such as The Nanny and
Coupling,
and have guest speakers of other varieties of English whenever available. The
point is, RP
is the springboard for a description of pitch phenomena in English, but the
students'
repertoire is greatly entriched by exposure to mainstream US and UK
'Englishes'.
>  
> Still, even after bringing into my classrooms varied descriptions of English
intonation, I
feel at a disadvantage when students are at odds trying to figure out the
patterns I
mentioned, either at the perceptual, explanatory, or productive levels.
>  
> Thanks again por such a quick reply. It's good to know there is s.o. out there
to interact
with. Warm regards,
>  
> Jose
>
> --- On Fri, 31/10/08, pronsig_mod <pronsig_mod@...> wrote:
>
> From: pronsig_mod <pronsig_mod@...>
> Subject: [iatefl_pronsig] Re: The Fall-Rise (O'C&A's 'switchback') vs. the
'Divided' Fall-
Rise ('high dive
> To: iatefl_pronsig@...
> Date: Friday, 31 October, 2008, 2:31 PM
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Hi Jose,
>
> Your difficulty with O'Connor and Arnold's range of intonation patterns is
completely
> normal. I'm a native British English speaker and I find it very hard to hear
or reproduce
the
> patterns they describe. Their work was impressive and, as one of the few
pedagogically-
> focussed, comprehensive books on intonation, "Intonation of Colloquial
English" still
> deserves to be cited. But, I'd say that both in terms of theory and pedagogy
there is
better
> work available now.
> In terms of theory, O & A's ideas are fine for a native speaker imagining the
sounds in
> their head, but when you look at research where real people were recorded, the
patterns
> are not at all consistent.
> In terms of pedagogy, the number of patterns, multiplied by the number of
grammatical
> contexts that they give, means that there are simply too many elements to the
model for
it
> to be a useful teaching method.
> If you want to teach the intonation of fairly formal standard Southern British
English, I
> would recommend Brazil's Discourse Intonation. It is simpler, and therefore
easier to
> teach, and works at a discourse level, and therefore fits with more recent
theory of
> language. Even better, because it includes some more recent aspects of
'spoken'
grammar,
> is Hewings' "Advanced Pronunciation in Use".
> The question I have to ask though is, why are you teaching RP intonation? I
think that it
is
> still useful for some purposes, but many people argue now that teaching RP is
not
useful
> or appropriate. What is the aim of the course? Who are your students? Do they
also
study
> GA, Australian, Indian, Singapore and Lingua Franca intonation?
>
> Alex.
>
> --- In iatefl_pronsig@ yahoogroups. co.uk, "Jose Tiziani" <jmtiziani@ ..>
wrote:
> >
> > I teach RP intonation to teacher trainees in Mendoza, Argentina, and
> > have found it difficult sometimes to sort both these patterns out in
> > terms of their presentation to the students, the appropriate
> > transcription (one tone group or two), the identification in instances
> > actual language in use, and the meanings conveyed, especially when it
> > comes to distinguishing a fall+rise pattern, each tone with its own
> > tone group, from a divided fall-rise in one tone group. Any suggestions
> > as to their theoretical status and/or pedagogy?
> >
>