Research Of Advanced Students Prosody Perception And Application

In the pronunciation teaching section of the Teaching Chinese as a second language area, initials, finals and tones attract much attention in the elementary and intermediate level teaching,while the prosody lose its due concern at the meantime. At the advanced stage, the high-level Chinese learners’prosody teaching is laid aside and neglected. Nevertheless, the reality is, foreign learners’ oral expression is fluent, but not that natural. Meanwhile, at the advanced level, the interaction between sound and sense is also ignored. However, the mastering of this interaction relationship reflects the learners’capacity to use linguistic element initiatively,and it also exhibits the ability to understand accurately and express oneself appropriately.In this research, a test was taken to learn the facts of prosody application among high-level foreign learners, and then a questionary and interview was followed to go deep into the survey. And combined with relevant theories, an analysis was made on the current situation of high-level learners’prosody application. On this basis, existing problems of prosody application were probed, causes of the problems were explored and improvement countermeasurcr. were proposed accordingly. This research can be divided into4main parts:In the first part, previous research achievements was summarized and then the ignored prosody section in pronunciation teaching is put forward. Based on this, the aim of the research was decided and research idea and approach was certificated. Qualitative research methods was adopted in the research.In the second part, the research design was conducted. The design can be divided into3parts:the first part is a test, and it consists of prosody differentiation in listening and prosody use in reading. The2parts respectively investigate the learners’mastering of the interaction between prosody and sentence meaning. The second part is questionnaire feedback and it concentrates on the meaning selection preference of the polysemous sentences. The third part is an interview, in which the subjects were asked to point out the means they use to distinguish the2different meanings of the same sentence,and then they were asked to talk about their prosody learning experience.In the third part, the collected data was tallied and organized. From the aspects of listening and reading, subjects’application of stress and pause was studied and the focal point was put on subjects’errors made in the test. At the same time, subjects’selection of prosodic features was recorded, their perception and setting of prosodic positons was tallied.In the forth part, on the basis of collected data, existing problems,causes and solving measures about prosody application among high-level learners were summed up. The high-level Chinese learners have a certain sense of prosody, but their prosody capacity presents obvious difference and randomness. In addition, the accuracy of prosody application, the mastering of stress and pause, prosody knowledge and prosody capacity development are all unbalanced. And the causes can be explored from the grammar and meaning explicit variation of sentence structure, the meaning preference and prosody instruction. In response to the problems, input-output theory,stimulus-response theory, and targeted specified training can offer good ideas for high-level learners’prosody capacity improvement.