by Ana Paula Biazon Rocha

On 20 November 2021, IATEFL PronSIG invited Lucy Pickering to run two sessions: Ask the Expert, where participants had the chance to ask her questions about intonation, and a workshop, where she provided us with great insights and activities on how to teach discourse intonation in the classroom. Pickering is one of the main experts in the area of Discourse Intonation, and teaches at the Texas A&M University, US. Thus, in this post, we will share six great tips from her sessions that we can, and should, incorporate into our lessons.

1. Make sure you understand what intonation is and why it is important

Pickering reminded us that intonation in English is based on the 3 Ps:

  • Prominence, which corresponds to utterance stress, where the prominent syllables are usually louder, longer and higher in pitch.
  • Pitch, which represents the melody of the speech, or the rises and falls in pitch.
  • Pause, which is about the creation of speech units in the speech stream.

She also reinforced that intonation helps us understand the speaker’s decision over what they want to say and how they want to say it. It is the basis of impression management, that is, what the speaker wants the listener to understand from what they say, and what the listener actually understands about what the speaker has said. If there are breaches in this interaction, the listener may end up misinterpreting the speaker’s meaning and making inaccurate inferences. Therefore, intonation can be seen as a system of probabilities because it essentially depends on the speaker’s choices, which will permeate the speaker and the listener relationship and their context of interaction. 

2. Teach discourse intonation instead of sentence intonation

Although intonation and communicative interaction are intrinsically related, in many instances, intonation is traditionally taught at a sentence level. In other words, in order to ‘practise’ some intonation patterns, sentences, which are often decontextualised, are given to learners. However, in real-life communication, the speaker and the listener do not make utterances in isolation but in discourse. That is why intonation should be taught at a discourse level. Pickering emphasised that all we need is a piece of discourse, something like 4 or 5 sentences. For example:

At a coffee shop
A: Hi.
B: Hi. Can I have a small caramel latte, please?
A: Sure. Are you staying in or taking away?
B: Taking away.
A: OK. Anything else?
B: That’s all, thanks.

For the first two utterances, when A and B say ‘Hi’ to each other, ask learners how changes in intonation patterns can affect the meaning and the development of the conversation. For example, if A sounds tired and bored, with a fall in pitch, how will B’s reply sound: rising or falling pitch? Why?, etc.

3. Raise learners’ awareness of listener irritation

Pickering mentioned that when learning about intonation, some students may overuse pauses or overemphasise prominent syllables, which can affect how they are understood. Similarly, other students may de-emphasise prominence, pitch and pauses in their speech, which can be equally problematic. These situations may lead to listener irritation, or heavy cognitive limitation, because the listener puts an extra effort into trying and figuring out the intonation patterns throughout the interaction with the speaker. Thus, learners should be aware of that, especially in terms of academic presentations, so they can balance things and build an effective communicative relationship with their listeners.

4. Teach intonation from the beginning

Due to a possible lack of confidence in teaching intonation or an inaccurate belief that learners will pick up pronunciation features of English incidentally, which is not true, some teachers may refrain from teaching intonation to elementary students. Pickering claimed that we should teach intonation right from the get-go. As mentioned in tip 2, we do not need any fancy material or a ‘perfectly’ prepared lesson. We only need to decide what we will focus on and discuss it with students. Otherwise, they probably will not work things out by themselves. Thus, Pickering advised us to talk to learners and ask: ‘What’s going on?, What are you hearing?’

5. Show learners the pragmatic function of pitch

Pickering emphasised that intonation is much more related to pragmatics than to syntax. She gave us some simple examples of how changes in pitch have a pragmatic function. Look at the following exchange:

A: Where is Glasgow?
B: In England.
A: No, it’s not in England, it’s in Scotland.↘

Do you think this is a natural exchange between adults in English? Doesn’t A sound a bit harsh and rude?


Pickering reminded us that in conversations we usually do not say to another adult, ‘No, you’re wrong!’ because of its abrupt effect. In fact, we use prosody, in this case, intonation, to signal that we disagree or that something does not sound right:

A: Where is Glasgow?
B: In England.
A: In England?↗

We usually do that with students, don’t we?

For native speakers, this pitch variation is natural and happens unconsciously. For L2 speakers, it does not happen like that, so we ought to teach it and help learners with it. 

6. Take on Pickering’s mantra: ‘Intonation is learnable and teachable’

Many teachers, myself included, have felt fear or experienced uncertainty about teaching intonation. Pickering’s sessions were a breath of fresh air as they inspire us to try and overcome such a challenge. Are you up for it?


For more of Pickering’s great insights and tips, please make sure you watch her Ask the Expert session on PronSIG’s Youtube channel here.


You can also learn more about Discourse Intonation from her book:
Pickering, L. (2018). Discourse Intonation: A discourse-pragmatic approach to teaching the pronunciation of English. University of Michigan Press.

Don’t forget to follow PronSIG on social media and leave your comments below.

That is a wrap for PronSIG’s blog this year. Thank you very much for your attention and support. Check all our blog posts in 2021 here. We’ll be back with much more in 2022!