An Empirical Study On Chinese EFL Learners’ Intonation Patterns Of Three Types Of Tag Questions

Intonation has been regarded as a vital linguistic phenomenon in communication, and it helps the speaker to convey their intended meaning. In learning intonation, the researchers study how the voice pitch rises and falls and how to make use of the pitch change to convey linguistic and pragmatic meaning. In English, tag question is a kind of sentence pattern which is commonly used in oral communication. The previous studies have investigated EFL learners’ English intonation patterns of different sentence types, such as, declarative statement, wh-question, yes-no question and imperative sentence, etc. However, empirical studies concerning intonation patterns of tag questions are rare.The objective of this study is to investigate Chinese EFL learners’ intonation patterns of three types of tag questions (informational tag questions, confirmatory tag questions and peremptory tag questions) by comparing their utterance with that of the native speakers’. Based on Halliday’s 3T system (tonality, tonicity and tone), the author carried out an empirical experiment to answer the following two questions:1) what are the characteristics of intonation patterns of Chinese EFL learners of three types of English tag questions; 2) what are the similarities and differences in intonation patterns of three types of English tag questions between Chinese EFL learners and native speakers. Subjects were 36 non-English major students from different universities in Nanjing and 8 native English speakers from America, and they were asked to read the material which contains three types of tag questions. In order to analyze the intonation patterns of the subjects, acoustic software Praat used to produce pitch contours of the recording.Results show that in the respect of tonality, compared with native speakers, Chinese EFL learners tend to depend more on pause to identify intonation phrase (henceforth IP) boundaries and prefer to divide one sentence (tag questions) into more but shorter intonation phrases.In terms of tonicity, improper use of nucleus placement is a common phenomenon among Chinese EFL learners. In tag questions, native speakers used to put the nucleus on the auxiliary verb whereas Chinese EFL learners preferred to regard personal pronouns as nucleuses. As to tone choice, since the Chinese EFL learners lack the systematic instruction of intonation, most of them excessively use the rising tone in all types of tag questions even if they have the awareness of choosing different tones pattern in different contexts.This study may provide some implications for the teaching and learning of English intonation. For English teachers, they should correct the improper idea that the accuracy of pronunciation outweighs the proper use of intonation and they should pay more attention to the suprasegmental features such as stress, prosody and intonation. For Chinese EFL learners, they may have better mastering of the three types of tag questions so as to use them appropriately.