An Analysis Of English Pronunciation And Intonation Problems

The thesis mainly deals with the English pronunciation and intonation problems of foreign school students in Lanzhou through an analysis of recording samples under the perspective of theoretical framework of English phonetics and pronunciation theory.The author collects,processes and analyzes sound samples,makes detailed acoustic analysis and data analyses of the subjects' English vowels,stress and intonation,and figures out several experimental results and finally lists some pedagogical implications.The empirical experiment undergoes the following steps.First,the author makes use of the Linguaphone received pronunciation recordings as well as the Wavesurfer software to do spectrogram analysis.Then,twenty-five middle school students from Lanzhou Foreign Language School are invited as the subjects to participate in the experiment,reading and recording the assigned reading materials.Then the author randomly chooses ten subjects' recordings as samples and transcribes them.The content of samples includes the subjects' vowels,stress and intonation.After analyzing the experiment,we find out the most typical samples and makes a detailed comparison of the data that are collected from samples and the data from standard RP speaker's recording by taking advantage of the Wavesurfer,the sound analyzing software.The thesis is composed of six chapters: the first chapter briefly introduces the research background,research significance and the organization of the thesis.The second chapter makes a detailed introduction of research on pronunciation teaching at home and abroad.It then reviews the relevant studies of English pronunciation problems in the past.The third chapter is the fundamental theory of the thesis relevant to the basic concepts of vowels,stress,intonation,teaching pronunciation and phonics.The forth part introduces the purpose of the study,research questions,research material and research design.Based on the phonetic theory,he fifth part analyzes the pronunciation of the subjects' recordings.After comparing the waveforms,spectrograms and pitches of those samples,the author finds out that the subjects' English knowledge of phonetics is weak,especially in vowels,stress and intonation.The last chapter offers some solutions according to the problems presented in the data analysis.The thesis makes some suggestions for English language learners and English education practitioners.