INTONATIONAL PROFICIENCY OF PASHTO – SPEAKING BS ENGLISH STUDENTS AN ANALYSIS OF THEIR SPOKEN ENGLISH

Abstract

This study explores the intonational proficiency of Pashto-speaking BS English students in spoken English, focusing on pitch accents, phrase accents, and final boundary tones across declarative, assertive, interrogative, and exclamatory sentences. Grounded in Autosegmental-Metrical theory and using the ToBI framework, it employs Praat software for acoustic analysis. Five final-semester students were recorded and compared with a native English speaker. The results show that while most participants correctly placed pitch accents, especially in declarative and assertive sentences, their use of standard pitch accent types was inconsistent. They performed better on expressive sentence forms like interrogatives and exclamatory sentences. However, the final boundary tones were largely inaccurate, particularly in less expressive contexts. The study also shows that most of the participants cannot realise phrase accents. The findings highlight learners' reliance on salient intonation patterns and difficulty with subtle prosodic features. The study recommends explicit instruction in English intonation and integrating acoustic tools like Praat into ESL teaching for better prosodic awareness.