Determining the effectiveness of teaching intonation of the English language at a university

Abstract

Introduction. Teaching the skills of adequate decoding of intonation is an integral part of teaching English, along with listening, speaking and reading skills. However, teaching this aspect is not always given sufficient attention. The purpose of the experiment is to identify the ability of students to decode the emotional characteristics of a sounding speech in a non-native language, as well as to reveal the correlation between the development of rhythmic-intonation skills and the level of the English language proficiency. Materials and methods. The research is carried out on the basis of the main tone groups of British English. The study is conducted by interviewing two groups of respondents with different levels of language proficiency (level B2 – 58 students) and C1 – 61 students). As a material for the survey, 11 statements in English were selected, having different intonation structure and belonging to different communicative types. The task of the respondents was to determine the attitude that the speaker puts into the utterance with the help of intonation. A correlation analysis was carried out between the level of English proficiency and the ability to correctly interpret intonation. The Chi-square criterion was used to calculate the homogeneity of two independent experimental samples. Results. The results of the study showed low ability of students to adequately interpret the English intonation and to identify the emotions of the speakers: correct answers gave 31.5% of respondents. We can conclude that students with the level of English proficiency C1, do not differ from students of group B2 in the level of perception of suprasegmental features of the English speech (χ2 = 10,06; p = 0,44). In other words, increasing the level of English proficiency does not affect the ability of students to correctly interpret intonation. Conclusion. The obtained result confirms the need for additional purposeful work on improving the methods of teaching prosody in a foreign language, aimed at improving the effectiveness of the educational process.