6. Tapescripts

• Listen to the following extract from the lecture carefully, sentence by sentence. Practise reading each sentence after the tape-recorder according to the suggested intonation patterns.

…OK, so what I’m going to do is to compare two very common styles of English: first of all, “rapid conversational style” – that is the kind of English that’s used when you are having a conversation with some friends or with some colleagues – and on the other hand I want to talk about “formal written style” – that is the kind of English that’s used in business letters, reports, textbooks, things like that.

• Listen to the following passage carefully, sentence by sentence. Underline the nuclear word of each intonation group, mark the stresses and tunes. Practise reading each sentence after the tape-recorder.

And I’m going to refer to the former as “Speech” in this lecture (of course there are other kinds of speech as well, obviously) and the latter as “Writing” (though obviously there are other kinds of writing as well, many other styles).

So, various points I want to make: first of all, Speech. Now, rapid conversational English is face-to-face, it happens when you can see someone and that is part of what go…go…is going on, the way that you can see what’s happening, and the other person can see what’s happening. It’s unplanned: you don’t know what you’re going to say until you say it, and it’s spontaneous.

• Listen to the following item carefully, sentence by sentence. Mark the boundaries of the sense-groups and the tunes. Practise reading each sentence after the tape-recorder.

Now, what I want to do is to look at the main features of Speech that you don’t get in writing. Um …well, let me just first …well, first of all, let me just … er … um …explain that … um …one of the things that doesn’t happen in …at all in …in writing but actually when you …when you’re …um…when you’re listening to someone you may not always notice it. You can probably notice …notice what I’m doing now … er …because I’m …I’m sort of trying to exaggerate this particular … er …this particular phenomenon that …that happens i…i…in conversation and I’m sure you can all fill in the gap in this sentence: ‘What I’m doing now a lot is …um …hesitating’. Now, hesitation is something which happens all the time in conversation but in writing it doesn’t happen.

• It is not expected that each student will intone the text in the same way.

• Listen to your fellow-students reading the texts. Be ready to analyse his/her reproduction according to the following parameters:

Characteristic features		Scientific style
Manner of presentation		the speaker sounds formal the speaker tends to be rather informal
Intonational patterns	(Low Pre-Head)		Stepping Head High Level Head Medium Level Head	Low Fall High Fall Low Rise Fall-Rise Mid-Level	(Tail)
The speed of utterance	normal b) accelerated
Rhythm	regular b) less regular
Pauses	predominantly short b) semantically or syntactically predictable c) hesitation pauses