TEACHING THE PRONUNCIATION OF INTERPERSONAL MEANING

Abstract

Teaching communication is teaching how to exchange meanings. Theoretically, the kinds of meaning exchanged include ideational meaning or the information conveyed in the text, interpersonal meaning or the feelings expressed by the speaker, textual meaning where the text is organized to create cohesion and coherence, and logical meaning where the structural and the logico-semantic relations created by the speaker establishes clear relations between the utterances in the spoken text. This article focuses on the interpersonal meaning that is conveyed not by grammatical rules of Mood and modality but, rather, by intonation. The intonation addressed here is not the kind of intonation patterns commonly found in pronunciation course books showing the ‘default’ intonation patterns of declarative, interrogative, WH-questions, etc. The intonation addressed in this study is the one that expresses the speaker’s feelings or interpersonal meanings that has yet to be thoroughly discussed in the existing literature. The present study tries to find out if there is a good model of teaching ‘attitudinal intonation’ by native speakers that has the potential to be developed further to address the issue of pronunciation at the text level. The rest of the article argues that the teaching of pronunciation needs to include the teaching of intonation to express different feelings at the text or discourse level.