An Empirical Study On The Development Of Suprasegmental Training

The thesis mainly deals with the development of suprasegmental training on Chinese English teachers from Qingpu District, Shanghai through an empirical experiment. By comparing subjects’ performances before and after the training respectively, the thesis is conducted to explore the development of suprasegmental training from the perspective of English intonation realization based on the theoretical framework of English phonetics and second language acquisition.The author collects and processes sound samples, makes detailed acoustic analysis and data analysis of subjects’ English intonation in terms of connectivity,nuclear placement, realization and nuclear tone in connected speech, and figures out several experimental results and finally lists some pedagogical implications. The experiment is designed upon the status quo of the suprasegmental knowledge mastered by selected primary school English teachers, which is classified as Before-Training and After-Training, with an intention of exploring their deficiencies and development in terms of suprasegmental features by comparing Before-Data and After-Data. The problems, nuclear realization in particular, have been presented,categorized and further analyzed to help subjects to revise and improve.First, a native speaker with standard RP is invited to read an appointed reading material and the record is conducted in a phonetics lab. Then, twenty-eight primary school English teachers from Qingpu District are invited as the subjects to participate in the experiment, reading and making records of the appointed reading material. Those vocal data, both from native speaker and subjects are then collected and analyzed by phonetic software Praat in terms of spectrum graph and pitch contour graph. The comparison is made between two groups, native speaker and subjects, to find out differences in suprasegmental features to draw a conclusion of the performance of twenty-eight subjects as the Before-Test Data. Third, all the subjects are asked to receive a suprasegmental training guided by a phonetic professor from SHNU lasting six months, which is prior to the second round ofreading and recording(After-Training Data). The After-Training data mainly deals with their performance after the six-month-training and the development compared with Before-Training Data concerning suprasegmental features.The thesis is composed of five chapters. The first chapter involves the introduction of the objectives, backgrounds, methods of experiments and layout of the thesis. The second chapter is literature review, with researches on this field and relevant theories involved both home and abroad. The third chapter deals with procedures in Before-Test and After-Test experiments. The forth chapter marks the most important findings. According to the acoustic analysis of subjects, we have found that most of them have little awareness of suprasegmental features,particularly in nuclear placement, intonation boundary placement, pitch range and nuclear tone application. However, it is undeniable that the thesis has limitations in experimental samples, less consideration of gender differences, technique errors and so forth, which would be discussed in the last chapter.It is hoped that the present experiment is helpful to further the research on suprasegemental features and its possible development in EFL learners. Additionally,this thesis explores a new way to make the comparison with an empirical experiment.It tries to offer a practical approach for researchers to make the empirical study in suprasegmental field, and hopes to be useful for language teaching and learning...