Examining narrow focus stretches of speech by speakers of british english and their importance in EFL teaching and learning

Abstract

The present investigation examined narrow focus stretches of speech by speakers of British English, and their importance in EFL teaching and learning. This study is relevant to EFL teaching and learning since it opens a scope of knowledge that has not been much explored yet. The corpus of this study was composed of natural speech by British speakers of English. It consisted specifically of eight conversations between two native speakers of the language, who tackled diverse topics and who interacted with each other in a natural manner. This posed a very complex scenario for the researcher, as the division into intonation groups became one of the most difficult tasks carried out in the analysis. Although many variables made it laborious to work with this type of data, the findings were revealing: More than 50% of cases were patterns in narrow focus. This can be a starting point for further research with this kind of corpus regarding intonation.