Text-structuring Metadiscourse Devices and Intonation Cues in Academic Spoken Monologues

Text-structuring Metadiscourse Devices and Intonation Cues in Academic Spoken Monologues Michael Cribb Coventry University

Abstract: Delivering academic spoken monologues is a key requirement for success at university level for most students. Besides the concern of speaking in front of an audience, an academic monologue requires students to utilise certain prosodic cues which are not always necessary or practised in face-to-face dialogue. Thompson (2003) has suggested that lengthy monologues require control over the use intonation cues (together with text-structuring metadiscourse devices) in order for the listener to understand the larger-scale hierarchical organisation of the discourse. Intonation cues serve to delimit the phonological paragraph (or paratone) with the separation of paragraphs being achieved through maximal pitch disjunctions, pauses, lengthening of speech and possibly laryngealisation. Text-structuring metadiscourse includes signposting devices which direct the listener in how to interpret the discourse (e.g. ‘first’, ‘to conclude’).These discourse structuring cues, when used in a native-like way, help the audience to develop a ‘mental map of the overall organisation of the text’ (Thompson, 2003: 6). For international students who are not native speakers of English, the lack of control over these organisational devices means that their monologues are often perceived as flat and undifferentiated by the audience. The prosodic cues and structuring devices are often under-used or applied in ways which confuse the listener. This paper will consider a corpus of spoken monologues from European and Chinese students at a British university. The paper will highlight how students use prosodic and metadiscourse structuring devices to segment the discourse into manageable chunks for the audience with varying degrees of success. Implications for teaching will be given.

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 • RQ1. Do students of English exhibit a narrower pitch range when making oral presentations compared to ‘experienced’ presenters (i.e. native lecturers)? • RQ2. 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

RQ1. Do students of English exhibit a narrower pitch range when making oral presentations compared to ‘expert’ presenters (i.e. native lecturers)? • Reduced pitch range for signaling the organization of their discourse *P<0.001 1: standard deviation 2:pitch dynamism quotient (Hincks 2004) 3. Engineering Lecture Corpus (Nesi)

Student vs Lecturer (10.WU vs ELC1) • 10.WU • ELC1

RQ2. 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) 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.

Mann-Whitney U-tests for LTD measures Pitch dynamism quotient (Hincks)

RQ2. 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 • No, 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

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 declination Thompson (2003); (McAlear, 2008)

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 presentations • Particularly Chinese students are going through university ‘under the radar’ • Intonation needs to be practised alongside other features: pausing, fluency, discourse marking, coherence

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.

Text-structuring Metadiscourse Devices and Intonation Cues in Academic Spoken Monologues