11 INTONATION/PRONUNCIATION ACTIVITY

Watch this video and complete the activity in Correspondence task 11 below.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/learningenglish/course/english-you-need/unit-7/session-4





1 How can a student who speaks with a lack of intonation sound to their listener?

a Bored, rude or uninterested in the conversation

b Extremely interested in the conversation

c Exciting and someone worth talking to


2 How do role-plays help students practise their intonation?

a Role-plays involve acting which makes students more self-confident, which will make their
intonation bolder.

b Role-plays involve acting, allowing students to practise being in certain situations, such as at
the doctors. This means they can memorise the intonation pattern for each dialogue.

c Role-plays involve acting which allows students to practise conveying emotion through their
intonation.


3 Why is contrastive stress useful to students?

a It allows students to more naturally emulate a native speaker in correcting wrong information and
highlight key words without explicitly saying so, which could be rude.

b It gets students better at being able to let people know that they are wrong, which makes the
student feel good.

c It gets students thinking about how to focus their intonation onto the single most important word
in their sentences, that way, if their pronunciation is wrong, at least the key word will be
understood.


4 Though not fully explained in the video, why is getting deeply into intonation theory not a good
idea?

a Students don’t need to know any intonation rules, they just need to copy the teacher.

b Intonation is like a fingerprint. It is somewhat personal to each individual.

c It takes too long to explain everything, which makes it a total waste of time.


5 What are the rules for question tag intonation?

a The question tag rises when we are asking for new information and falls when we are confirming
something we think is true.

b The question tag rises when we are confirming something we think is true and falls when we are
asking for new information.

c Question tags neither rise nor fall, but are always spoken with a flat intonation.