School Phonetics and How to Teach Prosody of English in Japan

This presentation will focus on building basic English Prosodic Skills which are very useful and helpful for Japanese learners of English. The focus first will be on recognizing the seven basic nuclear tones, analysing intonation structures, distinguishing intonation patterns and then on the way of improving speaking ability using sufficient verbal contents of intonation (mini-dialogue). My presentation deals mainly with some difficulties which Japanese learners of English have in the field of RP intonation, It is chiefly concerned with identifying, describing and analysing tone-group sequences. It sometimes happens that Japanese learners of English can pronounce isolated bounds correctly and read phonetic symbols sufficiently, bet have difficult problems in carrying out accurate prosodic features. The use of wrong intonation is sometimes the cause of misunderstanding of speaker's attitude, connotation and shades of meaning, etc.. However accurately students can pronounce the nuclear tone or tone-group of English, they have to learn how to connect tone-groups properly for suitable sequences in respect to meaning or implication. We are faced with the complicated theory of RF intonation on the one hand and difficult realization of it on the other. Japanese learners of English have special difficulties in employing "rising tune" and "falling + rising tune". If students are taught pitch movements by indicating dots graphically between two horizontal lines, they can easily understand the whole shape of pitch movements. In this presentation, I illuminate several tone-group sequences which are very useful for Japanese learning English intonation. Among them, four similar Pitch Patterns, such as, (1) (equation omitted)- type, (2) (equation omitted) - type, (3) (equation omitted) - type and (4) (Rising Head) (equation omitted)- type are clarified and other important tone-group sequences aye also highlighted from the point of view of teaching English as a foreign language. The intonation theory, tone marks and technical terms are, in all essentials, those of Intonation of Colloquial English by O'Connor, J. D. and Arnold, G. F., Longman, 2nd ed., 1982. The changes of tone are shown graphically between two horizontal lines representing the ordinary high and low zones of the utterance. A.C.Gimson (1981:314) : The intonation of English has been studied in greater detail and for longer than that of any other language. No definitive analysis, classifying the features of RP intonation, has yet appeared (though that presented by O'Connor and Arnold (1973) provides the most comprehensive and useful account from the foreign learner's point of view).