Perception And Production Of English Sentence Focus By Junior High School Students:An Experimental Study

Sentence focus,or "information focus",is the core element of sentence prosody,which carries the central information of the utterance.It is thus well acknowledged that the failure to perceive and produce the sentence focus,either broad focus or narrow focus,is doomed to hinder cross-cultural communication in L2 English for L2 learners.There is some research on the acquisition of English sentence focus among college students in China,yet so far very little is known about the extent to which junior high school students acquire English sentence focus.Based on this reality,the present study adopts an experimental design to explore this significant topic with the following research questions:1)To what extent do junior high school students produce English sentence focus correctly?2)To what extent do junior high school students perceive English sentence focus correctly?3)To what extent do the production of English sentence focus correlate with the perception?The present study consists of a production experiment and a perception experiment.The subjects were 91 junior high school students from Yangzhou suburbs and 30 ones from each grade.i.e.from Grade 1 to Grade 3.The target sentence focus covered both broad and narrow focus embedded in 105 carrier sentences,which were designed with two syntactic structures(SV&SVO)and three tenses(general present tense,general past tense,and present progressive tense).Furthermore,the narrow focus was located in three sentence constituents(subject,object,and adverbial).During the production experiment,the subjects read the carrier sentences and had their voice recorded,and during the perception experiment,they listened to the carrier sentences read by an English phonetician,and did the perception test after the listening.The subjects’ production data were digitalized,annotated and analyzed acoustically via Praat,and both the production and perception data were then statistically analyzed via Excel and Jamovi.The results of data analyses are as follows:Firstly,for the production of English sentence focus,the subjects’ overall correct productive acquisition means(CProAM)of broad focus and narrow focus are near 40%(Mean=0.397)and 30%(Mean=0.278)prospectively.For the CProAM of broad focus,there are significant differences between SV and SVO sentences(p<.001),no significant differences between 3 tenses(p=.302),and significant differences from Grade 1 to Grade 3 though the development patterns are not uniformly linear.For the CProAM of narrow focus,there are significant differences between 3 location types(p<.001)with object type ranking top and subject type ranking bottom,no significant differences between 3 tenses(p=.094)or between 3 grades(p>.05).Secondly,for the perception of English sentence focus,the subjects’ overall correct perceptive acquisition means(CPerAM)of broad focus and narrow focus are near 40%(Mean=0.372)and 50%(Mean=0.485)prospectively.For the CPerAM of broad focus,there are significant differences between SV and SVO sentences(p<.001),and significant differences between 3 tenses(p=.007),but no significant differences from Grade 1 to Grade 3,and the development patterns are not uniformly linear.For the CPerAM of narrow focus,there are significant differences between 3 location types(p<.001)with object type ranking top and subject type ranking bottom,no significant differences between 3 tenses(p=.302)or between 3 grades(p>.05).Thirdly,for the correlation between production and perception of sentence focus:for broad focus,subjects’ production of broad focus is better,however,no significant correlation between production and perception exists(r=-0.010,p=0.924).For narrow focus,subjects’perception is better,and there is significant correlation between production and perception(r=0.392***,p<.001).The production and perception of the broad focus are not significantly correlated with the subjects’ English proficiency,but the perception of the narrow focus is generally significantly correlated(r=0.253*,p<.001).The implications of the above findings are:firstly,junior high school English teachers should fully realize the importance of sentence focus acquisition in oral English teaching,and strengthen systematic instruction and perception training in daily.Secondly,English teachers should carry on pronunciation teaching in Grade 3 instead of focusing all the attention on the entrance examinations to senior high schools.Finally,English teachers should improve their oral English proficiency and the ability to use information technology,such as Praat to carry out visualized teaching of English pronunciation and intonation.