An Experimental Study Of English Falling Tone Produced By Mandarin EFL Learners

Intonation has been regarded as physical clothes of language,which plays a significant role in communication and is closely related to listening and speaking.English falling tone,as the basic intonation pattern,is difficult for EFL learners to acquire correctly.This paper reports an experimental study of English falling tone produced by Mandarin EFL learners,which intends to address the following three research questions:1.To what extent do Mandarin EFL learners produce English falling tones correctly?2.What are the acoustic features of English falling tones produced by Mandarin EFL learners?3.What are the typical errors of English falling tones produced by Mandarin EFL learners?The subjects of the present study are 30 Mandarin EFL learners,who were required to read English falling tones in five different phonetic contexts,and 4 English phoneticians,whose production of the treatment material was used as the standard intonation patterns.The experimental materials consist of English falling tones embedded in 8 simple words,4 short sentences,8 sentences with 8 types of tone-unit structures,7 sentences with different tail structures and 9 sentences with three types of sentences.The production of target falling tones by Mandarin EFL learners were recorded in the phonetics lab in Jiangsu University of Science and Technology and that by English phoneticians was collected in the Phonetics Lab of the University of Cambridge.The recorded data were first annotated and calculated acoustically via Praat5130 and then analyzed statistically via Excel and SPSS 12.0 to generate the answers to the research questions.The results of the data analyses are as follows:Mandarin EFL learners' overall correct production rate(CPR)of English falling tones is 69.44%.The categorical CPRs of English falling tones in simple words,in short sentences,in sentences with different tone-unit structures,in sentences with different tail structures,in sentences with different types are 89.17%,81.67%,74.58%,44.29%,61.48% respectively.Specifically,(1)As for English falling tones in five different phonetic contexts,the best produced English falling tones is in simple words,and the least produced English falling tones is in sentences with different tail structures;(2)For English falling tones in simple words and in short sentences,the number of syllables in carrier words has an effect on the CPRs of English falling tones;(3)For English falling tones in sentences with different tone-unit structures and different tail structures,the realization of English falling tones is affected by the tail.Acoustically speaking,few Mandarin EFL learner subjects were able to correctly produce the pitch,duration and intensity of falling tones as well as RP speakers.Specifically,one-sample t-test results confirm that there are significant differences in pitch ranges,durations and intensity of target falling tones in the five different phonetic contexts between EFL learners and RP speakers in most cases because of the negative transfer of L1 rhythmic pattern.Contrastive analyses of the data reveal four typical errors in the production of English falling tones by Mandarin EFL learners.Among them,51.56% of the English falling tones were mistakenly produced as the rising tones,the rising-falling tones or the level tones.20.68% were incorrect placements of nuclei,12.46% were incorrectly chunked with too many pauses,and 15.30% lacked the falling tails after producing correct tone patterns of nuclei.The pedagogical implications of findings are as follows: firstly,Mandarin EFL learners tend to lengthen the duration of nucleus syllables excessively because of their L1 negative transfer,and their incorrect placements of nucleus are also affected by their L1.Secondly,unsatisfactory production of English falling tones by EFL learners require that English teachers should be trained systematically and specifically so as to improve their intonation quality and instruction quality.Thirdly,incorrect tone patterns of EFLlearners in the production of English Falling tones reveal that more attention should be paid to the supra-segmental features of English speech such as stress and intonation for English teachers,which is an effective way for EFL learners to better acquire English intonation.Hence,the findings will provide insightful implications for the learning and teaching of English intonation in EFL learning context in China.