A Study Of Chinese College English Learners’ Stress Acquisition Patterns

In oral communication,Chinese English learners only learn some segmental features of English,but ignore the suprasegmental features of English,such as stress and intonation.Among them,stress is a big obstacle for Chinese English learners.The difference between Chinese and English makes it difficult for Chinese English learners to master the application of stress in spoken English.Some may notice the stressed syllables in a word,but when it comes to stress in connected speech,they will get confused.Therefore,the task of this research is to analyze Chinese college learners’ phonetic level of stress with the help of modern technologies.Different from previous studies,this study will be based on empirical research and will take rules governing the assignment into consideration.The first chapter,as the introduction of the research,provides research background,objectives of the research and the organization of the thesis.The second chapter discusses the basic concepts of English stress and second language acquisition theory,including Contrastive Analysis,Error Analysis and Inter-language Hypothesis.The domestic and overseas studies on English stress are also presented here.The third chapter describes the whole research design in detail,including research objects,research materials,and research procedures.Chapter four,the most important part,discusses the major findings of Chinese EFL learners’ stress problems referring to the collected data.In the first part of the test,participants are asked to read words,including two-syllable words,multi-syllable words,words with different affixes,homographs of different word classes and compound words as well as two-word noun phrases,to measure their mastery of English word stress.In the second section of the test,Chinese learners are provided with various sentences,including stress on function words,stress affected by pragmatic context and the stress deviations based on the analysis of feature of stress,aiming to measure Chinese college learners’ sentence stress proficiency.The last chapter summarizes the main research results of this paper.Negative transfer of mother tongue,psychological factors and other factors cause the problems of accent in Chinese college students.They have difficulties in assigning the stress correctly in the polysyllabic words.Compared with prefix,suffix is much more likely to be mispronounced by Chinese college learners for they are accustomed to not stressing prefixes.Besides,Chinese college learners lack stress knowledge on judging words with special suffix and they could not clearly distinguish compound words with noun phrases and they just put the stress on the right side habitually.As for sentence stress,stressed function words in Chinese make Chinese learners put the stress on the function words in English sentences.Repetition,rhythm,emphasis,and contrast also confuse Chinese learners.As for the stress deviations based on the analysis of feature of stress,there are also some problems.Such as,uneven stress intervals,the same long duration of stressed words and unstressed words,ignored length as well as pitch.At the end of this chapter,the limitations of this study and suggestions for future research are also pointed out.The author tries to put forward some suggestions and sincerely hopes to improve the present situation of English pronunciation teaching in Chinese universities.