An Analysis Of Accentuation And Intonation Of Chinese Senior High School Students

Introduction points out and analyzes the problems occurring in the process ofChinese foreign language learners’ learning the stress and intonation of the Englishlanguage, which is partly due to the innate features of their mother tongue. It also statesthe significance, methods and content of the research and designs the plan. In thechapter of literature review, the author introduces the course, current development andresults in the field of phonology and suprasegmental phonology both at home andabroad. The research is based on the theories of Tonicity’s Conditions proposed byCrystal, the triple division of intonation into Tonality, Tonicity and Tone proposed byHalliday and SAAR proposed by Gussenhoven. Chapter three illustrates and renderssome of the most important terminologies in the field, including stress and its definition,levels, categories and rules of designation. It also introduces the definition of Englishintonation, intonation groups and types. It explains the interrelation of the notions ofstress and rhythm, stress and intonation, the designation of stress and the types ofintonation on both the word and sentence level. Chapter four covers the comparison andcontrast of both the English and the Chinese phonological systems. It points out thepossible problems of Chinese foreign language learners’ learning the stress andintonation of the English language and analyzes the reasons.Experimentation features as the most essential part of this thesis. The speech andutterance of the subjects in question is recorded in a relatively quiet environment for thesake of the reliability and accuracy of data. The utterance and speech gathered covers awhole bunch of sentence patterns, which investigates the performances in the worst casescenario. It testifies the theoretical basis and verifies the existing problems. What’ more, it helps instruct and direct the learning and performance improvement of stress andintonation in their speech by analyzing the corpus of students under experiment and bymaking visual images of their pitches, intonation patterns, the location of nucleus andintensity(accentuation), comparing and contrasting between the subjects and the originalvocals. It also comes up with a constructive plan for the pedagogical activities ofintonation and stress.Conclusion takes a recap and highlights the problems. It also states the guidingsignificance of this thesis. At the meanwhile, it points out the insufficiencies and flawsitself and gives some advice to subsequent research and experiment.