Describing, listening and teaching questions and orders´ intonation in mexican, caribbean and castilian spanish to brazilian learners

The study intends to present results obtained from a methodology of intonation teaching, based on metacognition assumptions (Flavell, 1976; Gombert, 1992; Ribeiro, 2003). The methodology has five stages labelled as: 1 learner's awareness of the transfering their mother tongue (LM) into the target foreign language (LEA); 2 description of the intonational contour of total and partial interrogative utterances; 3-perception; 4-mimetic repetition; 5 oral production based on careful listening. According to Cortés (2002), intonation is essential to convey messages in an appropriate way, showing an expressive meaning besides syntactic-semantic aspectsand the meaning of the utterances. According to PINTO (2009), the E / LE learner transfers the intonational pattern of the LM when he or she in he/her LEA. How to teach intonation? This author proposed and applied a methodology of describing and teaching Spanish intonation to undergraduate students of Letras Portuguese / Spanish, from a public university in Rio de Janeiro. For this study, 18 utterances were written in Spanish as a foreign language, based on the Interactive Atlas of the Spanish intonation. The corpus is composed of 9 utterances in Brazilian Portuguese as L1, both compared to 9 utterances in Spanish as L1, totaling 36 statements. For such data collection, the informants received CD's composed of yes/no questions, confirmatory questions and declarative imperatives of request in the dialect chosen by each studentthe Castilian, the Caribbean and the Mexican. Recordings were made at two specific moments: before and after exposure to our methodology of description and intonation teaching. After teaching, we described the utterances phonetically and analyzed them with the aid of PRAAT software and following the Autosegmental Metric (AM) model. After this analysis, we compared the implementation of F0 and the tonal accent of these utterances, in order to check if the learner's accomplishment of the prosodic system undergoes alteration after the work of awareness, description, perception, mimetic repetition and production stuck in attention. We observed in our results that learners, before being submitted to our methodological proposal of intonation description and teaching, transfer characteristic of Brazilian Portuguese contours into the production of Spanish as a foreign language for all listed varieties. This fact confirmed the transfer process. However, when learners are Pinto e Rebollo Couto JoSS 5(2): 177-200. 2016. submitted to our methodological proposal, they mostly implement the expected outlines according to the chosen varieties.