The Learning of English Intonation by Spanish Speakers in a Distance Education Environment

This paper explores the advantages and disadvantages of using TL_ToBI to teach English intonation to Spanish native speakers in a distance learning environment. A study was carried out to compare the production of English intonation patterns by two groups of Spanish students of English phonetics, each of them trained with a different methodology: 1) the British School of intonation and 2) TL_ToBI. Each speaker recorded the following sentence types: declarative, yes-no question, wh-question, and imperative, produced both with neutral and marked readings. The results showed that those speakers trained with TL_ToBI produced more native-like intonation patterns than those instructed with the other model. These findings suggest that a system based on tonal targets and their association to the metrical structure has more benefits for the acquisition of the L2 prosody in a distance learning setting.