Teaching Phrasing and Intonation Directly and through Dramatic Activities

“It’s one thing to model fluent reading and another to directly teach students how to use correct phrasing and intonation.” (Beers, 2003, p. 216)  As Beers mentions in her chapter on Fluency and Automaticity, the way you read a text can make a big difference in how you interpret that text.  As an actor, I can certainly attest to that.  I remember my very own introduction to the subtleties of language in storytelling.  It was during an acting exercise in middle school.  In the exercise, students were paired off and asked to perform an improvisational scene using one very simple, non-punctuated sentence as the opening line.  I remember being taken aback by the broad spectrum of possible interpretations.  Each set of kids seemed to insert their own punctuation, intonation, and individual background into this simple sentence, creating six completely different stories.

            Beers (2003) suggests presenting a sentence like “You read the book” (p. 216) to the students, asking them to read the sentence four different ways, stressing a different word in the sentence each time.  After that she suggests presenting the same sentence with three different punctuation marks and again having the students read them out loud, followed by a discussion about the sentence and its many potential meanings.  While I find this work extremely relevant, I think it would be a lot more engaging for the students if the strategy were moved on to its feet for some hands-on practice.  I love finding opportunities to incorporate dramatic activities into the English classroom, and teaching the importance of phrasing and intonation while reading leaves the door wide open for this type of work.  In my classroom, I would consider combining Beers’ instructions with the experience I had, asking the students to explore these sentences in the form of a short dialogue in pairs.  In this way, students will gain a clear understanding of the significance of phrasing and intonation in the single sentence, as well as how that one sentence can affect the context of the rest of a story.  

Reference List:

Beers, K. (2003). When Kids Can't Read: What Teachers Can Do. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.