عباس عباسی

Intonation, a determinant speech feature in conveying meaning effectively and efficiently, has recently attracted much attention in laboratory-research recently, but suffers from dearth of pedagogical classroom research. To fill the gap, this study examined different prominent intonation teaching methods in a real classroom environment. The auditory method was compared to the audio-visual method in the presence and absence of metalinguistic awareness; meanwhile the effect of gender was investigated. Around 120 Iranian teenagers, with intermediate or lower-intermediate proficiency levels, were divided to four groups for each gender and after a pre-test and a nine-session treatment, were asked to read different kinds of sentences as the post-test, like the pre-test. The results indicated a significant improvement in the intonation production by the participants in the audio-visual method group who watched native speakers’ pitch contours and recorded and compared their pitch contours to those of native speakers’ using the PRAAT software. Intonation of the participants in the auditory method who just listened and repeated the native speakers’ utterances did not improve. Although providing metalinguistic awareness to the participants through explicit rules improved their intonation, the difference was not statistically significant. The study also found that gender was not an effective factor in learning English intonation. The study provided support that visualizing pitch contours of native speakers’ utterances is very effective in learning intonation and helps learners to be autonomous. The findings of this study can be employed by teachers to better understand and teach English intonation, by book designers to present intonation materials in an effective way by including visual aids, and by educational software developers to opt for a multimodal solution to facilitate intonation instruction and learning.