| In the pronunciation and intonation system, Chinese belongs to tone language while Englishbelongs to intonation language. Due to the difference between English and Chinese, Chinese studentscannot accurately convey the information when they communicate with native English speakersbecause of improper use of the intonation. According to Piaget's cognitive development theory, juniormiddle school students are in the early formal operational stage, in which they have relatively correctself-understanding for abstract concepts or assumptions. Moreover, during this period, the knowledgethat they have learned is not stable so a great space for cognitive development is provided. Whilesome cognitions of college students or adults have become fossilized, which is not conducive to becorrected or improved. Although junior middle school students have studied or had access to Englishbefore, most of their cognitions on English are limited with correct pronunciations and memory ofvocabularies. As for grammar study, they only know simple falling and rising tone modes of sentencesand lack sufficient cognition of abstract concepts on English intonation. If students'awareness withEnglish intonation is gradually enhanced, and lots of imitations are asked them to do in junior middleschool, it is easier for them to obtain accurate information, realize the feeling and identify the purposethe speaker expresses to continuously improve the learner's English proficiency, which lay a solidbasis for English language learning in the future.The purpose of this study is to investigate the intonation variations of middle school studentsduring the intonation acquisition process, for example, characteristics of prominence distribution andintonation patterns, which is to provide practical proposals for English teaching in order to promotelistening, speaking, and communication skills of junior middle school students. It mainly involvesthree aspects as following: 1) What are intonation regularities for Junior middle school students asEFL learners from the results of these sentence types, statements, Yes-no questions, WH-questionsand tag questions? 2) What are the differences between the intonation pattern of Junior middle schoolstudents as EFL learners and British English speakers? 3) What changes do imitation enables theJunior middle school students to have taken place in English intonation through microgeneticmethod?Based on Gussenhoven's SAAR rules and nucleus tone type proposed by O'Connor & Arnold,this study makes analysis on intonation patterns of four kinds of English sentence types of two students in Grade eight from junior middle school adopting Praat software by means of microgeneticmethod. Praat is software for voice annotation analysis. And then the present study goes on corpusacoustic analysis on English learners and native English speakers. Experimentally, the studygeneralizes the characteristics and the changes after imitation of intonation patterns of junior middleschool students, and then analyzes the causes which produce these changes. The research finds that: 1)Junior middle school students can not correctly reflect the non-Nucleus prominence distribution in thepitch changes of sentences. 2) Junior middle school students have relatively simple English intonationpatterns. That is, they only know a single tone mode for each sentence type. They only use fallingtone in statements or Wh- questions while always intend to use rising tone in Yes-no questions and tagquestions. And generally the falling or rising tone is shown only in the end of sentences; 2)interrogative pronouns are tended to be stressed by junior middle school students. Through continuousimitation practices, learners have a certain understanding of prominence distribution and pitch ofdifferent sentence types, prominence is more obvious and the intonation patterns of sentences havechanged in general.
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