Study On The Ability To Make Pause-extension In Reading And Speaking By Foreign Students

Pause-extension is not only the physiological needs of pronunciation, but alsothe needs for better expression and understanding. Pause-extension is affected notonly by syntactic structures but also by meaning, prosody and rhetorical needs.Usually foreign students speak Chinese in an unnatural tone. The main reason of thisphenomenon is that they can't make pause-extension skillfully. From the angle ofteaching Chinese as an 2nd language, we study the ability to make pause-extension inreading and speaking by foreign students. We select some typical sentences and apassage and record the reading of these materials by foreign students and their freetalks. Using phonological software for Experiment—PRAAT, we make acoustic studyof the recording and compare the reading of foreign students with that of a nativeChinese speaker. Basing on the datum gathered from the acoustic study, we analyzethe types and reasons of errors. The main types of errors are grammatical errors,errors of parsing sense groups, prosodic errors and confusion of different levels ofpause-extension. The main reasons of making errors are that the students don'tunderstand the syntactic structure and prosodic rules of sentences. They don'tunderstand the function of pause-extension and won't observe the rules of itconsciously. Finally, we put forward some suggestions, which are cultivating sense ofpause-extension, specific pause-extension exercises and reinforcing the languagechunk teaching.