Practising Prosodic Features for Better Teacher Talk

Successful communication depends much on intonation, stress and rhythm. Intonation is the melody of speech. Intonation means how the pitch of your voice rises and falls, and how speakers use this pitch variation to convey meaning. If we had no intonation, our speech would be monotonous. Either it would remain one pitch throughout, or every utterance would employ exactly the same stereotyped tune all the times. But speakers do neither of those things: they make the pitch of their voice rise, fall and jump in all sorts of different ways.  How can we acquire the various aspects of voice modulation?   One has to listen to different samples of English and internalise the articulatory features of spoken discourse such as pause, stress, tone and rhythm. You can listen to the best samples of spoken language like dialogues in films and plays, speeches, news bulletins, interviews etc to acquire a feel for the sounds and rhythm of English.  If you do this regularly you can speak and communicate in English well.