Using film clips for intonation teaching in ESP

Research in second-language learning has recognized the impact of intonation on the intelligibility and comprehensibility and on the successful communication of the speaker’s intent and attitude. Therefore, the teaching of intonation seems particularly important in English for Specific Purposes (ESP), where it should be based on realistic models and aim at developing the specific communication skills required in the target contexts. However, intonation is difficult for second language learners to acquire since they may have little awareness of prosody in speech. This thesis reports on a pilot study which aimed at determining the effectiveness of a guided awareness raising activity based on the use of film clips. The purpose was to test the adequacy of a teaching unit about intonation designed for an ESP course for restaurant workers. The study involved 23 students attending a BA first-year English language course at the University of Padua. Recordings of the subjects uttering six phrases selected from an ESP textbook for restaurant workers were collected before and after their participation in a guided activity, in which one group of subjects was provided with short film clips to be used as models in reproducing the intonation of the selected phrases, while a second group was provided with the same clips and the pitch contours of the phrases extracted from the clips with the speech analysis software Praat. The subjects’ pitch contours before and after the guided activity were extracted from the recordings and analysed by comparing them to the reference pitch contours from the film clips. The results of the analyses performed seem to indicate that the activity proposed led to improvements in the subjects’ intonation productions as similarity of their pitch contours with the reference pitch contours increased after the guided activity. However, in contrast with the findings of previous research, they do not show a significant effect of the activity with audio-visual input over that with auditory input alone.