A Study Of Chinese EFL Learners’ Intonation Patterns Of Lists

Intonation is an indispensable part in communication, which can eliminate grammatical ambiguity, convey information and express emotions and attitudes of speakers as well. The importance of intonation in daily communication results in the upsurge of intonation researches at home and abroad. Previous researches have investigated the intonation patterns of some sentence types including yes/no questions, wh-questions, declarative statement and exclamatory sentences and so on. However, empirical studies focusing on intonation patterns of lists are rare.This study aims to investigate Chinese EFL learners’intonation patterns in read speech under the framework of Halliday’s 3T system. An empirical experiment was carried out to answer the following questions:1) What are the characteristics of Chinese EFL learners’tonality of lists? In particular, will Chinese EFL learners’ tonality be interfered by grammatical components of listing items and syntactic structures lists and are there any differences between high proficiency learners and low proficiency learners? If any, what are they? 2) What are the characteristics of Chinese EFL learners’tonicity of lists and are there any differences between high proficiency learners and low proficiency learners? If any, what are they? 3) What are the characteristics of Chinese EFL learners tone patterns of lists? In particular, what are the characteristics of Chinese EFL learners tone patterns of routine lists and demonstrative lists and Are there any differences between high proficiency learners and low proficiency learners? If any, what are they?There were 40 Chinese EFL learners, including 20 high proficiency learners who are English majors having passed TEM 8 and 20 low proficiency learners who are non-English majors having failed CET 6 participating in this study. Their read speeches were analyzed by an acoustic software Praat.The major findings of study are:1) Pause is the most frequently used boundary cue in Chinese EFL learners’tonality of lists. Pause and pitch reset sometimes appear simultaneously at boundaries of intonation groups. Chinese EFL learners show great consistency in the tonality of three-part lists and their judgments of intonation groups in lists are considerably interfered by conjunction words in lists. Few Chinese EFL learners are able to employ different tonality to differentiate different semantic meanings bearing in two lexically identical lists; 2) The frequencies of using unmarked tonicity are higher than marked tonicity in Chinese EFL learners’read speech. The percentage of unmarked tonicity in high proficiency learners’read speech is higher than that in low proficiency learners’. The types of words as unmarked tonicity in high proficiency learners’read speech is more consistent than those in low proficiency learners’read speech. Chinese EFL learners, both high proficiency learners and low proficiency learners, are inclined to put marked tonicity on nouns; 3) Few Chinese EFL learners are able to use different tone patterns to indicate different types of lists. Chinese EFL learners tend to use rising tone or mid-level tone for non-final listing items and falling tone for final items. Mid-level tone mainly appears in low proficiency learners’speech, which can be seen as a characteristic of low proficiency learners’ speech.