Intonation and feedback in the EFL classroom 187In what follows I address myself to the role of intonation in enabling a
student to decide which of these three options the teacher has selected.
Each option will be considered in turn.
Negative assessment
The nature of the classroom activity being investigated, carefully structured
and rehearsed pattern drills and question—answer sequences, means
that the number of unacceptable responses compared with acceptable
ones is small. Outright rejection normally only follows a student’s
misunderstanding of what is required of him leading to an inappropriate
response, as in:
8 T: //o the NEXT one please //
S: //p he’s SLEEPing //
T: //o NO //o NO //p THIS one //
After an appropriate but in some way unacceptable response, the usual
procedure adopted by teachers in the corpus is to re-initiate the exchange,
attempting to elicit a corrected response either from the same or a new
student. In such cases intonation is often significant in conveying the teacher’s
expectations for the subsequent response.
9 S: //p she COOK a CHICken //
T: //o SHE //
S: //p COOKED a CHICken //
In this example, the teacher provides an incomplete quotation of the student’s
response in feedback, selecting o tone (level or neutral tone). The established
classroom convention is that the student should complete the quotation,
making necessary modifications. The significance of tone selection becomes
apparent if alternatives to o tone are considered.
10 S: //p she COOKED a CHICken //
T: //r+ SHE //
Here the feedback is likely to be heard as an indication that ‘she’ is the item
in need of correction, and result in a second response such as:
11 T: //r+ SHE //
S: //p HE cooked a chicken //
Brazil (1985:147) suggests that one reason for a speaker selecting r+ tone
is that the lexical matter of the tone unit is in some way in need of reactivation.
The echo of ‘she’ in (10) indicates to the student that he should reconsider