A Study On Chinese EFL Learners’ Perception Of English Intonation

With the advances of globalization, English communicative competence has drawn increasing attention and English intonation, as an important supra-segmental feature, plays an irreplaceable role in actual communication. The study intends to explore Chinese EFL learners’ perception pattern of high fall, low fall, high rise, low rise and fall-rise in English intonation and find out its cause of formation. Specifically, three research questions are covered in this study: 1) can Chinese EFL learners perceive English intonation precisely; 2) will different intonational constituents influence Chinese EFL learners’ auditory perception of English intonation; 3)how does L1 interfere with Chinese EFL learners’ perception of English intonation?This study adopts configuration theory from the perspective of intonation construction to investigate 62 Chinese EFL learners’ perception pattern of English intonation via acoustic approaches. On the basis of experimental data, Praat software has been employed to make a detailed analysis of Chinese EFL learners’ perceptual situation of English intonation and figure out the cause of formation from the point of L1 influence. The major findings are as follows:1) Chinese EFL learners’ perception pattern of English intonation is far from being satisfactory and the order from high perceptual accuracy rate to low perceptual accuracy rate goes: high rise, low fall, high fall, low rise and fall-rise. Besides, due to the subjects’ unbalanced perception of the two tones in a pair, the same tone is perceived differently when it combines with other different tones: the perceptual rate of the tested tone will be improved when it is in combination with the tone of relatively high perceptual rate; on the contrary, the perceptual rate of the tested tone will be lowered if it combines with low perceptual tone. It also proves the instability of Chinese EFL learners’ perception to English intonation.2) Different intonational constituents can influence Chinese EFL learners’ auditory perception of English intonation. For high fall, low fall, high rise and low rise, tones with nucleus only have the highest perceptual rate, next is with nucleus and tail, the third is with nucleus and head, and tones with nucleus, head and tail possess the lowest perceptual rate in all the tested tone. However, the perceptual rate of fall-rise is little affected by different constituents and maintains a low level, which confirms the subjects’ insensibility of fall-rise. Additionally, most Chinese EFL learners are unable to perceive nucleus preciselythrough the presentation of pitch contours.3) It is proved that mandarin experience is the primary cause that influences Chinese EFL learners’ perception of English intonation by the contrastive study between English intonation and Chinese intonation: the subjects are accustomed to distinguishing English tones by the pitch of sentence ending part which is important in Chinese intonation, or by its general pitch movement; the weakening of the nucleus in Chinese intonation results in Chinese EFL learners’ insensibility to the nucleus in English intonation.In conclusion, many problems exist in Chinese EFL learners’ perception of English intonation.To promote Chinese EFL learners’ acquisition of English intonation, this thesis provides several specific suggestions: configuration approach and comparison are applicable to English intonation teaching; besides, educatees should understand the differences between Chinese intonation and English intonation to avoid the interference of Chinese intonation on the acquisition of English intonation.