Hi Jose,

Your difficulty with O'Connor and Arnold's range of intonation patterns is
completely
normal. I'm a native British English speaker and I find it very hard to hear or
reproduce the
patterns they describe. Their work was impressive and, as one of the few
pedagogically-
focussed, comprehensive books on intonation, "Intonation of Colloquial English"
still
deserves to be cited. But, I'd say that both in terms of theory and pedagogy
there is better
work available now.
In terms of theory, O & A's ideas are fine for a native speaker imagining the
sounds in
their head, but when you look at research where real people were recorded, the
patterns
are not at all consistent.
In terms of pedagogy, the number of patterns, multiplied by the number of
grammatical
contexts that they give, means that there are simply too many elements to the
model for it
to be a useful teaching method.
If you want to teach the intonation of fairly formal standard Southern British
English, I
would recommend Brazil's Discourse Intonation. It is simpler, and therefore
easier to
teach, and works at a discourse level, and therefore fits with more recent
theory of
language. Even better, because it includes some more recent aspects of 'spoken'
grammar,
is Hewings' "Advanced Pronunciation in Use".
The question I have to ask though is, why are you teaching RP intonation? I
think that it is
still useful for some purposes, but many people argue now that teaching RP is
not useful
or appropriate. What is the aim of the course? Who are your students? Do they
also study
GA, Australian, Indian, Singapore and Lingua Franca intonation?

Alex.



--- In iatefl_pronsig@..., "Jose Tiziani" <jmtiziani@...> wrote:
>
> I teach RP intonation to teacher trainees in Mendoza, Argentina, and
> have found it difficult sometimes to sort both these patterns out in
> terms of their presentation to the students, the appropriate
> transcription (one tone group or two), the identification in instances
> actual language in use, and the meanings conveyed, especially when it
> comes to distinguishing a fall+rise pattern, each tone with its own
> tone group, from a divided fall-rise in one tone group. Any suggestions
> as to their theoretical status and/or pedagogy?
>