A Study Of Chinese EFL Learners' Use Of The Attitudinal Function Of English Intonation

As is known to all, intonation plays a vital role in oral English communication, especially in the world today when political, economic and cultural exchanges are increasingly frequent. Intonation can not only eliminate grammatical ambiguity, convey information, but also express the speaker's attitude and emotion. However, difficulties in understanding and even misunderstandings may arise when people are unable to use English intonation appropriately, which often occurs between a native speaker and an EFL speaker and makes it difficult to achieve effective communication. This study aims to explore Chinese EFL learners'use of the attitudinal function of English intonation in specifics and hopes to describe the general picture of it and make some useful suggestions to intonation teaching.This research is based on Halliday's three"T"s theory and is conducted among the junior students in Harbin Institute of Technology. This study contains two main parts: native speakers'perceptual judgments and analysis through Praat. First of all, the relevant intonation studies in recent years are searched and from them 29 sentences that are used to perform 20 different attitudinal/emotional functions, for example,"happy, discontented, impatient and proud etc."are chosen as the recording material. The researcher takes the recording when the participants read the sentences. Then four American teachers listen to the recordings and grade the participants'intonation performance according to a five-point Likert Scale. Finally, the researcher analyzes the speakers'specific features in the division of intonation groups, nucleus placement and the intonation patterns with the assistance of the phonetic software Praat.The result suggests that the Chinese participants'performance in the use of the attitudinal function of English intonation is generally not as good as the native speakers; the Chinese students perform unevenly in the 19 attitudes/emotions; the English-major students perform better than the non-English-major students; the Chinese students'pitch range and nucleus tone patterns are different from those of the native speakers'and the difference in nucleus placement is smaller; besides, the Chinese students tend to overuse the falling tone. It is hoped that the result of this study will attract attention to the attitudinal function of English intonation and provide references and guides for English intonation teaching.