Developing Students’ Speaking Ability By Teaching Prosodic Features Through Speech Visualization Technology At Junior Middle School

In recent years, with the understanding of the function of speech in communication and the popularization of communicative teaching method, people have been paying increasing attention to the importance of pronunciation teaching. However, due to the diversity and complexity of factors in pronunciation learning, pronunciation teaching has been a weak link in language teaching. How to improve the students’ ability to distinguish speech features and the ability to use phonetic knowledge involved in actual communication through classroom teaching has long been a focus for many language researchers.This paper reports on an intervention study with a total of 54 Chinese EFL learners(mean age: 14 years old) learning English at a junior middle school with the purpose of finding out the answers to three research questions:(1) Does the Speech Visualization Technology improve students’ oral English ability in terms of stress and intonation?(2) What’s students’ attitude toward the application of Speech Visualization Technology in language learning?(3) What’s the relationship between students’ attitude and their English oral ability?54 middle school students from two different classes in Grade one were participants of this study. Class A and Class B are respectively experimental class and control class. In the experimental class, teacher uses speech visualization software in teaching pronunciation while in control class teacher uses traditional way which is common in Chinese English classrooms: students follow the teacher or the tape and repeat for several times. Both classes were given a pre-test before the research session. At the end of the 8-week study period, both classes were given a post-test. The result of this study suggested that EFL learners learning through Speech Visualization Technology were more successful than the students who were taught through traditional method. With an attempt to reveal students’ self-perception of pronunciation with visualization technology, questionnaire of 5 point Likert scale was administered at the end of the 8-week period which shew a positive attitude towards learning prosodic features through speech visualization technology. At the end of this paper, suggestions on teaching pronunciation are presented.