Intonation and feedback in the EFL classroom 191The primary distinction within Brazil’s system of tone choice is between
rising (R) tone and falling (P) tone. The significance attached to choice of
rising tone is that the speaker, by its selection, projects both himself and
the hearer as belonging to that group of people who already share the
information carried by the lexical and grammatical content of the tone
unit. In this way it can be said to be ‘integrative’ or to be projecting a
state of convergence between speaker and hearer. Selection of proclaiming
tone, on the other hand, is ‘divisive’ or projecting a state of divergence,
in that the speaker marks the hearer as not belonging to that group of
people who share such information. One specific aspect of this general
invocation of the convergence/divergence relationship is that the speaker,
through tone selection, is able to mark the content of the tone unit as
either ‘shared’ or ‘new’ knowledge. By selecting proclaiming tone the
speaker may, for instance, indicate his expectation that what he is saying
is something the hearer didn’t already know. In offering his response as
a performance, the acceptability of which is so far unnegotiated, the student
presents it to the teacher for approval or rejection. The evidence suggests
that while positive assessment is proclaimed, some other tone choice is
made for negative assessment or a withholding of assessment.
While proclaimed feedback such as in (20) and (21) can be seen
simply as an indication of the acceptability of the response, the teacher
can, of course, indicate a great deal more than this if he chooses, and we
will now consider repetitions of all or part of the student’s response as,
for example, in:
22 S: They were listening to the radio.
T: Yes. They were listening to the radio. or
T: Good. Listening to the radio.
In particular, attention will be focused on segmentation into tone units and
key selection. An acceptance followed by a repetition can often be glossed
either as ‘Yes, that’s acceptable but it could have been improved in this
way’, or ‘Yes, that’s acceptable, and notice in particular this.’
In the following example the teacher gives a positive assessment (b) and
then repeats the response (c).
23 S: //o NOW //o abdul HAFfis //o is CLEANing //p the
BOARD // (a)
T: // p oKAY // (b)
//o NOW abdul HAFfis //p is CLEANing the BOARD // (c)
The hesitancy of the student’s response (a), with frequent tone unit boundaries
being realized by short pauses, apparently reflects the more general
observation that the planning and pre-coding of ‘chunks’ of language in
tone units by non-fluent speakers of English advances in shorter steps.
The teacher, in his repetition, opts to distribute tone unit boundaries
differently. A possible interpretation of his decision to repeat the response