Study On Features Of The English Intonation Patterns In Northwestern Chinese EFL Learners’ Read Speech

English intonation is essential to convey the information, eliminate ambiguities and express the speaker’sattitude in communication. Over the past few decades, the traditional intonation studies in Britain havedeveloped smoothly and a relatively mature English intonation system has taken into shape. In his1967work, Halliday claimed that English intonation plays a vital role in the effective conveying of information,and that English intonation needs to be studied from three perspectives, namely, tonality, tonicity, and tones.Halliday’s theoretical framework of English intonation has been developed and enriched by some otherresearchers like Crystal (1975), Quirk (1964), Tench (1996), O’Connor and Arnold (1973), Cruttenden(1997), etc. However, compared with those native speakers’ studies on English intonation, there has beenonly several researches on Chinese EFL learners’ intonation patterns, even less on Northwestern ChineseEFL learners’.Based on Halliday’s3T (Tonality, Tonicity, and Tone) system, a comparison study was carried out between40Northwestern Chinese EFL learners majoring in English and10natives in their productions of a short passage.Recorded speech was first collected, and then annotated on the computer with software tools, thus a corpusof Northwestern Chinese EFL learners’ read speech was created, enabling Northwestern Chinese EFLlearners’ intonation patterns to be researched objectively. With the application of the computer software AdobeAudition, Praat and a questionnaire, acoustic analysis and statistical analysis in the study explores the intonationpatterns of Northwestern Chinese EFL learners. In the end, this thesis pointed out the meaning of the research forthe teaching and studying of English pronunciation and intonation and presented the limitations and suggestionsof this research.The purpose of this study is to find out problems of Northwestern Chinese EFL learners’ English intonationpatterns in their read speech. There are three aspects which have been investigated: the features of NorthwesternChinese EFL learners’ tonality, tonicity and tone selection. By comparing the performance of NorthwesternChinese English learners and natives, the major findings are concluded as follows: As to tonality, there are morepauses and longer pauses in learners’ read speech than native speakers’, which not only clearly suggests theinter-language features of the Northwestern Chinese EFL learners in their learning process, but also shows theinfluence of their mother language and their dialects. As to the side of tonicity, inappropriate nucleus placementis dominant in Northwestern Chinese EFL learners’ production. The lexical words as unmarked tonicity arerandomly used, which indicates that learners’ perception for information focus in a tone group is not good. In the respect of tone，Chinese learners are able to use the basic tone types, but they easily misuse some specific tonesand some of them overuse the falling tone.This research helps Northwestern Chinese English learners have a better recognition for their ownpronunciation, and at the same time, English teachers should have known that teaching pronunciation is not onlythe teaching of segmentals, what suprasegmental features could affect the pronunciation of Chinese Englishlearners should also be weighted.