A Research On The Prosody Of Reading Aloud Essays In Putonghua Proficiency Test

Prosody refers to the linguistic features such as the high pitch or low pitch, unstressed or stressed, long or short, high speed or low speed, pause and joint etc. in phonetic units like syllables or the units that is bigger than syllables.Chinese prosody has such components as pause and joint, rhythm, stress, tune, intonation, mood and so on. Chinese is a kind of tone language which has abundant prosodic features. The item of short essay reading aloud occupies 30 scores in Putonghua Proficiency Test. It is not enough only paying attention to the initial consonant and the finals to get high marks in part of reading aloud, the rhythm features in the essays are also worth our special attention. Rhythm is the crux to avoid dialectical and foreign accents.The intonation errors, the improper pause and joint, the fluentness deficiency score items in the score criteria of <Putonghua Proficiency Test Implementation Summary > are qualitative score items. These items are crossed,this lead to the difficulties in scoring and the score gap among different testers. The current score criteria of short essay reading aloud doesn't run out of suffering situation due to lack of theory.We create a new score criteria of short essay reading aloud which is divided into seven items instead of the intonation errors, the improper pause and joint, the fluentness deficiency and the over time items. The seven items are: tone error; intonation error; mood error; improper pause and joint; improper cadence; improper word or sentence stress; too fast or slow speed. Each items contains two grades 0.5 score and 1 score. This score criteria is better than the current one. It pays attention to the rhythm components and has scientific presentation and balanced score level. It can make the qualitative score items quantified to the maximum. It has obvious effects on improving the score accuracy and reducing the score gap among individual testers.The degree of one's mastery of prosodic features on short essay reading aloud is closely related to test scores. Generally speaking, a good master of rhythm features means a high test score, otherwise the opposite. Teaching of rhythm features on short essay reading aloud is weak in Putonghua teaching. It can attain good results only by attaching importance to the teaching of rhythm features, building up students'language sense through intensive training, improving the theoretical level of the teacher himself and the students and so on.