Practising Prosodic Features for Better Teacher Talk

For English as Second Language foreign language learners, classroom is the main place where they are frequently exposed to English. The kind of language used by the teacher for instruction in the classroom is known as teacher talk. What ESL teachers speak is often unintelligible to the learners. Many aspects of communication are determined by stress, pause, rhythm and intonation. Faulty stress, pause, rhythm and intonation patterns cause greater difficulty than the inaccurate pronunciation of individual sounds. These features of connected speech are called prosodic or suprasegmental features.