A Study Of Chinese EFL Learners’ Prosodic Features

English prosody is of great significance in oral English. There are three fundamental components of English prosody: stress, rhythm and intonation. Stress can help highlight the key information; rhythm can make sentence sounds fluent and natural; intonation can describe the pitch tendency of rise and fall in a sentence. The thesis chiefly deals with the comparative study on distinctions of three fundamental prosodic features of English between Chinese EFL learners and American native university students based on the theoretical framework of English phonetics. A series of experiments have been carried out to study the prosodic features of English of Chinese EFL learners. Through comparison between American university students’ reading, problems of stress, rhythm and intonation are pointed out. Specific research methods are comparison and contrast, which is reflected in acoustic analysis of rhythm, stress and intonation.This thesis consists of six chapters. Chapter One is an introduction to the current situation of English prosody of Chinese EFL learners, and it introduces the research background, purpose, value and thesis structure. Chapter Two, the Literature Review part, elaborates the related studies on prosody, fundamental components of English prosody, the teaching of English prosody and theories related to English Prosody. By sorting them out, highlights of English prosody are summarized, thus suggesting the insufficiencies of the previous studies on English prosody. Next, Chapter Three gives the research questions of this thesis, followed by the explanation of research procedures, participants, materials, data collection and the ways to measure fundamental prosodic features of English. Chapter Four, the body part, analyzes the processes in detail the audio data of Chinese EFL learners and American university students. Through the method of comparison, problems lying in stress, rhythm and intonation are pointed out. In terms of stress, Chinese EFL learners spend less time reading the stressed syllables than American university students. In addition, duration of vowel in stressed syllables is not long enough. When it comes to rhythm, Chinese EFL learners are influenced by mother tongue, so they read English in a syllable-timed way rather than in a stress-timed way. In the aspect of intonation, method of comparison and contrast is used for tonality, tonicity and tone; therefore, problems of intonation are concluded from these three perspectives. To be specific, instances of several attributive clauses and noun clauses are taken, and they shows that the Chinese EFL learners have no idea of where and how to divide the sentences into certain intonation groups. As to the location of nucleus, Chinese EFL learners randomly put stress on syllables instead of giving prominence to the syllable which should be emphasized. For intonation contours, eight sentence types(declarative sentences, non-final sentences, general questions, specific questions, tag questions with agreement expected, alternative questions requiring a choice, sentences with a series of lists and greetings) are analyzed. compared with American university students, Chinese EFL learners have two main problems in their English prosody. On one hand, Chinese EFL learners do not make sense of the knowledge that different sentence types should apply different intonation contours, and they are unconscious of that. On the other hand, the intonation contours of Chinese EFL learners have less peaks and valleys than those of American university students. Besides, choices of intonation contours and multi-functions of commonly-used intonation by two groups of participants are compared. It indicates that Chinese EFL learners tend to be influenced by mother tongue. Therefore, Chinese EFL learners are more likely to use falling tone in most of the sentence types and use falling tone for multiple functions. But for American university students, they often apply the rising tone on most occasions, and they do not use the falling tone so frequently as Chinese EFL learners do. Chapter Five presents pedagogical implications on the teaching of English rhythm. Some effective teaching strategies on English prosody, teaching procedures and sample lesson plans are offered Chapter Six concludes the whole thesis. Based on the major findings and limitations, some suggestions for future research are provided.