About this activity
Eight items on prosody and intent: oh, great said flatly when his car won't start — literal or sarcastic; nice job said right after you drop the ball; I LOVE waking up at five a.m., how do you know this is sarcasm; a text reading cool. with a full stop; this is fine during an obvious disaster; how does the meaning change when the pitch drops at the end. The last one names the acoustic cue directly.
How to use it in a session
Produce each line twice, sincerely and sarcastically, and let the student sort them. Hearing the same words carry opposite meanings is the fastest route to understanding what tone is doing, and it is much more effective than describing it. The final card — what happens when the pitch drops — is where the cue gets named explicitly, which some students need before they can hear it. Fifteen minutes covers the eight.
What to listen for
Listen for the student using context when tone is unavailable. The text message item has no prosody at all, so the only cues are punctuation and situation, and a student who can do the spoken items and not that one is relying entirely on voice. Watch this is fine, which is sarcastic only because of the situation and is otherwise a perfectly literal sentence.
Carrying it home
Saying the same sentence two ways is a game that takes ten seconds. Getting a child to guess which one was meant sincerely builds exactly this skill without any materials.
Questions
- What ages is this for?
- Ninth through twelfth grade.
- Is it free?
- Yes, all eight items play with no account.
- How is this different from the sarcasm game?
- That one has sixteen items with answer options. This is a shorter, more discussion-shaped set that names the acoustic cue — falling pitch — directly.