Intonation focus in the interlanguage of a group of Spanish learners of English

Abstract

The present paper is a report on intonation errors made by a group of Spanish learners of EFL in their last y ear of Secondary School (2 ° Bachillerato) .More specifically, we attempt to identify and classify the errors relating to the students' use of intonation to highlight information. With this aim inmind, we have used the tonetic approach to intonation analysis as the theoretical framework for the study. When comparing the students' performance with English native speakers', two types of errors emerge, interference and developmental. Once more, contrasts between English and Spanish regarding the focalisation of information by means of intonation (tonicity) can serve the purpose of explaining some of the errors (interference). At the same time some developmental errors are detected in the students' intonational interlanguage.

Dubbing attitudes through tonal patterns: when tones speak louder than words

“…Drawing on O'Connor & Arnold (1973), Brown et al (1980) and Cruttenden (1997), who state that some attitudes are more likely to occur with some types of tonal patterns, it was possible to establish a direct correlation between the tone used in a particular utterance type and the attitudinal content related to that tone. This study adheres to the works by numerous experts in the field of intonation in both English (Crystal, 1969;O'Connor & Arnold, 1973;Collins & Mees, 2003;Wells, 2006;Tench, 2011) and Spanish (García-Lecumberri, 1995;2003;Gutiérrez Díez, 1995;Monroy, 2002; to determine which attitudes can be related to a specific tonal pattern. This research is thus underpinned by existing studies that help envisage a taxonomy able to associate a tonal pattern with a repertoire of attitudinal meanings.…”

Pragmatics and Prosody in English Language Teaching

“…In one of them (Gutiérrez 2005 ) , the reading aloud of an English text by both native English speakers and high school Spanish learners of English in their second year of Bachillerato (sixth-formers) yielded the following results: the Spanish informants produced about fi ve times the number of tone units produced by the English ones (an average proportion of 185 to 40 tone units, respectively). In one of them (Gutiérrez 2005 ) , the reading aloud of an English text by both native English speakers and high school Spanish learners of English in their second year of Bachillerato (sixth-formers) yielded the following results: the Spanish informants produced about fi ve times the number of tone units produced by the English ones (an average proportion of 185 to 40 tone units, respectively).…”

“…There are sharp tonicity contrasts between English and Spanish regarding the alignment of nucleus with function words. The most frequent error of this type is made with personal pronouns in fi nal tone-unit position (Gutiérrez 2005 ) . However, in English, function words in fi nal position may not be nucleus bearers, except in cases of marked contrastive focus (marked tonicity).…”