Determining the Intonation Contours of Compound-Complex Sentences Uttered by Turkish Prospective Teachers of English

In academic speaking and writing, compound-complex sentences are hardest to articulate and write because they are longer and require certain pauses via chunking information into smaller units for nuances of emphasis in the flow of sentence so as to promote the audibility and perception. By structure, a sentence with at last two independent clauses plus one dependent clause is called a compound-complex sentence. Since the compound-complex sentences combine elements of compound and complex sentences, they are the most sophisticated type of sentences that can be used in speech or writing. Native speakers can break clauses in sentences into intonation units (or meaning units) of different lengths by depending on their own intended meaning. The aim of the research is to pinpoint where 30 freshmen of the English language Education Department of Faculty of Education at Hacettepe University in the Department of English Language Education insert the pauses (sustained juncture phonemes) as intonation boundaries in the structure of compound-complex sentences. In this research, the corpus will consist of 15 compound-complex sentences with two main clauses and one subordinate clause. They will be downloaded from Longman Dictionary of English (with CD) by means of Audacity downloading program 1.2.6, which are uttered in 44100 Hz in North American English (NAE). By the principles of Error Hunt Approach and Advanced-learner Approach, these 15 sentences will be compared and contrasted with the recorded utterances of 10 PhD students to determine the pausing skills of Turkish professional teachers of English.