In this paper the nature and relevance of the information provided by intonation is discussed in the framework of second language learning. As a consequence, an automatic intonation assessment system for second language learning is proposed based on a top-down scheme. A stress assessment system is also presented by combining intonation and energy contour estimation. The utterance pronounced by the student is directly compared with a reference one. The trend similarity of intonation and energy contours are compared frame-by-frame by using DTW alignment. Moreover the robustness of the alignment provided by the DTW algorithm to microphone, speaker and quality pronunciation mismatch is addressed. The intonation assessment system gives an averaged subjective