29th June 2012

Intonation and Stress as Discourse Structuring Devices in International

Students’ Oral Presentations

Michael CribbDept. of English and Language

<aa6177@coventry.ac.uk>

• Abstract: Oral presentations are a common form of assessment at university level and include a performance aspect where students are under pressure to deliver academic monologues to audiences in real-time; unlike an essay, say, which is mostly concerned with content. For international students, the burden of performing under such conditions means that their English language is tested to the extremes. In particular, East Asian students have problems in delivering natural-sounding monologues and often rely on scripted deliveries. This means that intonation and stress, which are important features for segmenting monologues into manageable chunks and establishing hierarchical relationships between parts, are often under-specified, leading to the talk being perceived by the audience as ‘flat’, undifferentiated and even monotonous. In addition, students might only receive minimal feedback on their performance in the form of a mark and a few notes from the tutor which limits their capacity to learn and improve on a skill that is difficult to acquire naturally without intervention. The proposed paper will present some samples of discourse from international students delivering oral monologues and will discuss how miscues in intonation and stress (which are prosodic features) lead to incoherence and a loss in meaning. The paper will also analyse students’ reactions to delivering oral presentations through the analysis of a series of pre- and post-task interviews conducted with students. This will highlight some of the intervention strategies tutors can enable to improve feedback to students and develop remedial work.

Contents

• 1. Background• 2. Research Questions• 3. Consistency and Contrast• 4. Pedagogical Implications

1. BACKGROUND

Oral presentations

• Value & significance for students

• Less support from interlocutor

• Elicits monologic discourse

• NNSs often stigmatized

Text-structuring Metadiscourse Devices and Intonation Cues

• Thompson (2003) has suggested that lengthy monologues require control over the use of text-structuring metadiscourse devices and intonation cues in order for the listener to understand the larger-scale ‘hierarchical organisation’ of the discourse. … For international students who are not native speakers of English, the lack of control over the use of these organisational devices means that their monologues are often perceived as flat and undifferentiated (Tyler & Bro, 1992) by the audience.

2. RESEARCH QUESTIONS

Research Questions

• 1. Do students of English exhibit a narrower pitch range when making oral presentations compared to ‘experienced’ presenters (i.e. native lecturers)?

• 2. Do Chinese students exhibit a narrower pitch range compared to European students?– H1: Chinese students will exhibit a narrow pitch

range compared to European students

Participants & task

• 22 students of English.• 20 Chinese; 22 European• Module: Advanced English for Business and

management. UG 3rd year.• 15-20 min. oral presentation in group• Target students recorded with clip-on

microphone & voice recorder• Discourse transcribed; analysed using SIL

Speech Analyser software

1. Do students of English exhibit a narrower pitch range when making oral presentations compared to ‘expert’ presenters (i.e.

native lecturers)?

SD1 PDQ2

Students 33.7 0.146*Lecturers3 47.1 0.230*

• Reduced pitch range for signaling the organization of their discourse

1: standard deviation2:pitch dynamism quotient (Hincks

2004)3. Engineering Lecture Corpus (Nesi)

*P<0.001

Student vs Lecturer (10.WU vs ELC1)

• 10.WU

• ELC1

2. Do Chinese students exhibit a narrower pitch range compared to European students?

– H1: Chinese students will exhibit a narrow pitch range compared to European students

Long-term Distributional (LTD) measures (see Mennen et al, 2012)

N Mean f0

SD SD3 Range (max-

min f0)

PDQ 90% span

80% span

Skew Kurtosis

European 12 181 35.7 26.53 378 0.158 101.7 64.0 1.66 17.8

Chinese 10 207 31.3 27.31 315.9 0.132 97.9 66.9 0.24 4.59

ALL 22 192.9 33.7 26.90 349.8 0.146 100.0 65.3 1.01 11.7

Mennen, I., Schaeffler, F. & Docherty, G. (2012). Cross-language difference in f0

range: a comparative study of English and German. Journal of the Acoustical Society

of America, 131 (3), 2249-2260.

Pitch dynamism quotient (Hincks)

Mann-Whitney U-tests for LTD measures

Measure U Z sig. (2-tailed) Effect size (r)Mean f0 52.0 -0.528 0.598 0.112SD 49.5 -0.693 0.488 0.148SD3 50.0 -0.659 0.510 0.140Range (max-min f0)

30.5 -1.946 0.052 0.415

PDQ1 41.0 -1.253 0.210 0.26790% span 60.0 0.000 1.000 0.080% span 52.0 -0.528 0.598 0.113Skew 34.0 -1.714 0.086 0.365Kurtosis 19.0 -2.703 0.007* 0.576

– H1: Chinese students will exhibit a narrow pitch range compared to European students

• Not true! There are no observed differences between Chinese and European students (except for Kurtosis)

3. CONSISTENCY AND CONTRAST

Consistency & Contrast

• Can a student use a reduced pitch range but still be an effective communicator?

– 7.SIM: Lowest PDQ (0.73) but idiosyncratic style may help

Use of upspeak (7.SIM)

• | in ↗CONtrary |• | (0.4 er) →addiDAS |• | addidas is a GERman ↗COMPany |• | (0.5) FOUnded in NINEteen forty ↗EIGHT|• | (0.6) and er NAME come from the NAME of the↘↗ FOUnder of

this company |• | (0.6) and er the NAME is CREATE from (.) ↗ADI |• | and LAST three letters from his ↘SURname create all the name |

Paratones – ‘spoken paragraph’

• At end of paratone:– fall in pitch– lengthening of speech and insertion of pauses– laryngealisation (creaky voice) and /or loss of

amplitude• At start of new paratone– marked pause– first tone unit raised in key– high key evident in subsequent tone units creating

declinationThompson (2003); (McAlear, 2008)

ROM1Globalization nowadays:

Cultural: Americanization

Technology: global telecommunication infrastructure

Information

Wars: UNO, NATO, Terrorism.

Language: English, in the future Chinese?

Economic

• I’m going to talk about the the different er effect of the globalisations

• the first is er cultural• the most famous example is Americanisations• we can xx for example• like music • the American music er dominate the world

market• the movies of which fifty percent of the of all

movies now showing in Europe er are American

• and the (proportions) rise to er eighty percent in Germany or England

• and finally the export of major global brands• for example in clothes industry like er Nike or

xx• and in food industry like McDonalds or Coca

Cola• er technology • the global telecommunication infrastructure

which permits greater xx xx exchange

Actual structure is…

• Globalisation– Cultural• Example: Americanisation

– Music– Movies– Export of brands

– Technology

• (but the prosody does not signal this well >> ‘flat, undifferentiated discourse’)

PIE1

• so first of all I gonna speak about the place of birth the ethnicity and the religion

• so you have to know that the interviewer can ask you if you have a correct work place to legally work in u-k

• but interviewer are not entitled to to ask you about your place of birth your ethnicity your religion about your personal history

• they can't do that • (5.5) erm okay so now I'm gonna speak about about

marital status the children and the sexual preference • so about the marital status • the interviewer are a bit er not not really fair because

they shouldn't take any preference but they often do

16.CHEN_A

• | and the third point is the (pro- provide) the battery rail CAR |

• | in the tourist er PLACE |• | ↗because er it can (protect) animal |

4. PEDAGOGICAL IMPLICATIONS

Consistency & Contrast

• Consistency– Use of pitch, pausing and discourse marking needs

to be consistently applied over the whole of the presentation

• Contrast– Use of pitch, pausing and discourse marking needs

to be contrastive to segment the talk into hierarchical units

• A narrow pitch range may not necessarily be a burden on the audience if the student can deploy consistent and contrastive intonation patterns that are explicitly marked

Suggestions for teachers

• Pro-active intervention strategies• Students need ‘targeted’ assistance with

intonation in presentations• In particular, Chinese students are going

through university ‘under the radar’• Remedial classes

RTPitch

References• Barr, P. (1990). The role of discourse intonation in lecture comprehension. In M. Hewings (Ed.), Papers in

Discourse Intonation (pp. 5–21). Birmingham, UK: University of Birmingham, English Language Research.• Foster, P., Tonkyn, A. & Wigglesworth, G. (2000) Measuring Spoken Language: A unit for all reasons. Applied

Linguistics, 21(3), 354-375.• Hincks, R (2004) Processing the prosody of oral presentations. Proceedings of InSTIL/ICALL2004 – NLP and

Speech Technologies in Advanced Language Learning Systems – Venice 17-19 June, 2004• Nesi, H. The recordings and transcriptions used in this study come from the Engineering Lecture Corpus

(ELC), which was developed at Coventry University under the directorship of Hilary Nesi with contributions from ELC partner institutions. Corpus development was assisted by funding from the British Council (RC 90) April 2008- August 2010.

• McAlear, S (2008) Unpublished MA Dissertation. Univ of Nottingham• Mennen, I., Schaeffler, F. & Docherty, G. (2012). Cross-language difference in f0 range: a comparative study

of English and German. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 131 (3), 2249-2260.• Pickering, L. (2004) The structure and function of intonational paragraphs in native and nonnative speaker

instructional discourse. English for Specific Purposes; Jan2004, Vol. 23 Issue 1, p19, 25p• Thompson, S.E. (2003) Text-structuring metadiscourse, intonation and the signalling of organisation in

academic lectures. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 2, pp. 5-20. • Tyler, A. & Bro, J. (1992) Discourse Structure in Nonnative English Discourse: The effect of ordering and

interpretive cues on perceptions of comprehensibility. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 14(1), 71-86.