A Study Of Some Chinese-College Students In Acquiring English Stress

Nowadays, a growing number of attentions have been put on the phoneticteaching, in which English stress occupies an essential position. This thesis presents astudy of some Chinese-college students’ acquisition of English stress to discover thecharacteristics and problems of them in their acquisition procedure.This paper covers six chapters. Chapter one is the introduction. Chapter two isthe literature review. Chapter three is the theory foundation. Chapter four is theresearch methodology and common problem hypothesis on some of Chinese-collegestudents in acquiring English stress. Chapter five is the analysis on the experiment.Chapter six is the conclusion.The investigation is carried out with digital recording pen, and the recording isanalyzed with the help of Praat Microsoft, software for phonetic analysis. Mainproblems of Chinese-college students in acquiring English stress exist as follows.Word stress:1) stress errors in single words with two syllables or more than twosyllables;2) stress errors in some English words with certain special affixes;3) stressshift errors including tonic stress errors, emphatic stress errors, contrastive stresserrors and alternative stress errors;4) stress errors in compound words: a two-wordcompound often takes a single stress while a two-word phrase takes double stresses.Sentence stress:1) stress errors in content words and function words;2) errorsbecause of rules for variations in sentence stress such as repetition, rhythm, emphasis,and contrast.These findings may cast light on the college-English teaching and learning inChina. Thus, a number of scientific and feasible suggestions in college-English classhave been put forward.