The Accentuation Of English Phrases By Chinese EFL Learners

Proper distribution of accent plays a significant role in the naturalness and interpretation of natural utterances (Prieto. Van&Hirschberg,1995). However, Roach (2000) pointed out that "Incorrect accent placement is the major cause of intelligibility problems for foreign learners, and is therefore a subject that needs to be treated very seriously." Yet, few empirical studies concerning Chinese EFL learners’ accentuation, especially accentuation of English phrases, have been done. Therefore, the acquisition of accentuation of English phrases by Chinese EFL learners was set as the focus of the present study.The present study tried to analyze the accentuation patterns of18English phrases including noun phrases, verb phrases and prepositional phrases embedded in ten dialogues produced by390Chinese EFL learners. The data was extracted from the ESCCL—nglish Speech Corpus of Chinese Learners (Chen. Li&Wen,2010). It was discovered that the biggest problem for the vast majority of the Chinese EFL learners was that they were not aware of the significant role that context plays in accentuation. Secondly, Li transfer cannot be ignored in the accentuation of English phrases. Thirdly, about half of the students had a confusion of right-most prominence and left-most prominence in their accentuation of English phrases. That was why two fifths of them put the wrong nucleus even in broad focus circumstances. Forthly, the Chinese EFL learners tended to de-accent content words, such as nouns, verbs, and adjectives less than necessary while accented function words such as prepositions, auxiliaries and articles too much. Finally, the learners often accented words in a phrase equally and had no nucleus so that hierarchical information status was not achieved. Based on the above findings, this research suggests that the awareness of the importance of English accentuation should be raised for both instructors and students.