Instructional Design For College English Intonation Teaching Based On Implicit Learning

English is a typical language that features the use of intonation.As an indispensable part of oral production,intonation plays a significant role in oral communicative competence.However,due to the limited lessons and the single assessment,teaching of intonation in college English courses does not receive the attention it deserves.The problem of "emphasizing pronunciation but devaluing intonation" that exists in middle school English teaching has not been yet effectively solved in college.It is increasingly urgent to strengthen teaching of intonation in college English courses so as to promote the fluency and vividness of learners' oral expression.Based on the theory of Implicit Learning,the present study is meant to answer two questions: 1)How to design an effective intonation teaching in college English courses by taking advantage of the positive effects of Implicit Learning? 2)What effects does the implicit intonation teaching model have in improving learners' intonation acquisition in the experimental teaching?According to the law of Implicit Learning,the present study divides intonation teaching of college English into three stages: emotional input,perceptive difference and "over-learning".Each stage lasts for 4 weeks with a total of 12 weeks.These stages are embedded in other college English courses in the first semester of freshman year,taking15-20 minutes of class time each time.Material selecting,classroom instruction and evaluation in the course of intonation teaching are all implicit,which aims to guarantee that learners can make use of positive effects of implicit learning in acquiring intonation.The teaching experiment selects 23 students as the research subjects,asking them to read a short text,which functions as the pretest to know the subjects' initial situations of acquiring tonality,tonicity,and tone.Then comes the 12-week intonation teaching following the designed model.The post-test is conducted 12 weeks later with the same task as done in pretest.With the help of Praat and SPSS Statistics 17.0,quantitative processing of audio materials and the analysis of the data are carried out.The findings are as follows:(1)In terms of tonality,the subjects in the pretest rely much on tonality.After the implicit intonation training,the number of tonality is found lessthan that of the pretest and the syntactic errors in tonality are reduced significantly.(2)In terms of tonicity,there are some problems in the pretest: decentralization of the core vocabulary,and the high proportion of the marked tonicity especially in function words.After the implicit intonation training,the number of marked tonicity is reduced significantly,which is reflected by the decrease in frequency of the use of non-real words(articles and prepositions)that work as tonicity and the increase in frequency of the use of unmarked tonicity.However,the total number of unmarked tonicity shows no obvious improvement.(3)In terms of tone,the subjects in the pretest rely much on falling tone.The subjects seldom use low falling tone and low drop tone in second tone and they use high falling tone in high frequency.After the implicit intonation training,it is found that there are remarkable improvements in the use of low drop tone and the use of low falling tone is slightly improved.However,the use of high drop tone shows few improvements.Based on the analysis above,the implicit intonation teaching model has improved various aspects of learners' intonation acquisition: significant enhancement in tonality,a slight improvement in the adjustment of tone and invariant nucleation position.In the future,the intonation teaching model can be optimized by prolonging the length of the first stage of teaching and the length of total duration.