AHMAD MUZAKKIR BIN MOHAMAD AIZUDDIN BIN ROJALAI PISMP TESL 3 SEMESTER 2

Question 4 Two major aspects of suprasegmental phonology are stress and intonation. How can the knowledge of these features help a learner to improve his/her speech? The knowledge of suprasegmental features is very important in

communication. Some of the features are stress and intonation. Stress means the way you give a special attention to a part of word in three basic aspects that are louder, longer and at the higher pitch. Meanwhile, the definition of intonation, according to (Underhill, 2005), is the pattern of pitch change over an utterance or series of utterance. That means, intonation is the sound changes produced by the rise and fall of voice when we are speaking, especially when it has important meaning behind it. English speakers use word stress and intonation to communicate rapidly and accurately, even in difficult condition for instance, if you do not hear a word clearly, you can still understand the word because of the position of stress and intonation. Therefore, how can these suprasegmental features help a learner to improve his or her speech? First and foremost, by knowing about the stress and intonation, it enables the learner to express his or her emotion during speech delivery. As we all know, stress and intonation are very important for the learner as it helps the listener to interpret the message. In delivering speech, in order to express our emotion, we need to have various skills in order to attract listeners attention. For example, fall tone, rise tone, listing and fall-rise tone. Each of these tones is functionally distinct, that is they convey different attitudes, intentions and meanings to the listener, as it has been stated above. Thus, for the fall tone, it is regarded as quite neutral and it conveys a certain sense of finality, for example, I strongly agree! Meanwhile, the rise tone conveys an impression or general questions. For instance, Can you do me a favour? Plus, the fall-rise tone is normally to convey the feelings of approval and disapproval and the example of the sentence is, I dont think that he would agree. Based on the above explanation, we could see that stress and intonation really help the listeners to differentiate the meaning of the sentence uttered by a speaker and at the same time can improve the speakers speech.

AHMAD MUZAKKIR BIN MOHAMAD AIZUDDIN BIN ROJALAI PISMP TESL 3 SEMESTER 2

On the other hand, the stress and intonation knowledge also helps a learner to improve his or her speech by knowing on how to differentiate the word classes of a word either it is a noun, verb or adjective. English does not have a fixed stress. This is because, it can be found either at the beginning, middle and final syllable. For example, the word survey can be either a verb or a noun. The example of the first sentence is, I want to surVEY all TESL 3 students in order to know more about the class problems. The second example is, This SURvey shows that the students are enjoying the lesson today. In the first sentence, survey is a verb and the stress is on the second syllable while the second sentence stresses on the second syllable since it is a noun. Therefore, when a leaner is delivering a speech, they already know how to differentiate between the words classes according to the stress and intonation. It makes the listeners to understand easily of what he or she had said. Besides that, the other way on how the knowledge of stress and intonation helps a learner to improve his or her speech is by the discourse function and intonation. In other words, it conveys the given new information, or provides information for turn taking. Example of the sentence is, Its raining. Isnt it? Based on this sentence, the speaker wants to tell another person that it is raining by using the telling pitch. If the speaker uses the asking pitch, the meaning of the sentence will be changed. It shows that the speaker is asking a person whether it is raining or not and at the same time, the speaker is expecting an answer. This is called turn-taking. As a result, if the learner knows about the stress and intonation, he or she can improve their speech as well. Last but not least is, in order to improve a learners speech, the stress and intonation knowledge can help him or her by recognizing the grammatical function of intonation. That means, it helps to recognize the grammar and syntactic structure of the utterance. According to (Underhill, 1994: p.84), there are many sentence type with different stress and intonation. For example, if the sentence is WH questions, the intonation of the sentence is just falling as well as imperative, exclamation, question tags and expecting confirmation. But, if the sentence is a yes or no question, the tone is rising. By knowing this syntactic structure of utterance, it will help a learner to

AHMAD MUZAKKIR BIN MOHAMAD AIZUDDIN BIN ROJALAI PISMP TESL 3 SEMESTER 2

improve his or her speech because this knowledge is very important. A speaker is capable of differentiating between declarative and imperative sentence. In conclusion, it is vital to speak using the right stress and intonation so that it is comprehensible. Without the appropriate usage of stress and intonation, it is very hard to understand what a speaker is trying to convey. With the difference of stress and intonation, a speaker can change the meaning of the utterance. Furthermore, by knowing this skill, we will be more confident to speak.