EFL Learners’ Intonational Deviations In Reading Aloud

Intonation is the soul of language. It is not only the method for emotional expression, but also the important cue for information transmission, so it is an essential prosodic feature of a language. English is an intonation language and Chinese belongs to a tone language. Therefore, there are big differences between them.It is necessary to research on the intonation learning of Chinese EFL learners. The intonation studies abroad are relatively comprehensive, while it falls behind in China because many intonation studies are just theoretical and they do not provide enough empirical evidences. Many researchers just compared these two different language systems to predict the difficult points or explain students’ mistakes.Based on the former literature review, this study adopted the intonation system of Halliday(1967) as the theoretical basis, took the phonetic software Praat, Excel as study tools, followed the annotation rules of TOBL and then compared the intonation features of 40 Chinese college EFL learners(10 English majors and 30 non-English majors) with 10 native English speakers. Further, the deviations were observed and summarized and then the related causes and reasons were explained. In the end, the findings were collected and both theoretical and practical implications and suggestions were proposed. The study of the deviations of English intonation between English native speakers and Chinese college EFL learners can not only enrich and the development of phonetics in China, but also provide empirical evidence for realistic English teaching.Based on the three research questions, the study contents consist of three aspects:the intonation grouping, the distribution of nucleus and the tone selection. The results show that, on the whole, learners have weak awareness of English intonation. They cannot correctly make tonality, identify nucleus and select proper tone types. The specific findings are listed below: 1) pause is the major boundary indicator of learners who do not take good use of other indicators like pitch reset which a high percentage of native speakers did; the pause of learners is much longer, which breaks the speech fluency and it is not beneficial for information transmission and emotion expression;though some intonation groups are not proper, learners do better in the fitness between the intonation groups and grammatical structures; 2) For nucleus distribution,the unmarked tonicity of learners is lower than that of native speakers, which shows that learners lacks the perception of the relation between nucleus and information focus; further, many functional words are taken as nucleus by learners, which results in the information focus is weakened; 3) In tone selection, learners are familiar with English sentence patterns, but their sense of secondary tone is weak, so a lot of sentences of the level tone have appeared; 4) there is no big significance between the English majors and non-English majors, but English majors rarely take the functional words as nucleus and their level tone proportion is lower, which is attributed to their specialized course.