A Study On The Production And Perception Of English Stress By Chinese College Students

Stress,as one of the most important suprasegmental features,plays an irreplaceable role in communication.This thesis aims to investigate the overall acquisition state of word stress and sentence stress of Chinese college students in the perception and production,find out the difficulties in stress learning and explore the causes.Research questions include:(1)can Chinese college English learners output or perceive English stress precisely?(2)what are the general features of English stress of Chinese college English learners in the production and perception?and(3)what are the similarities and differences in the production and perception of English stress between English majors and non-English majors?This research compared and analyzed the acquisition state of English word stress and sentence stress among 40 English major learners and 40 non-English major learners based on the perception and production test via acoustic approach.Thirty-five words,five noun phrases and five conversations were selected as research materials.Adobe Audition 3.0 was used to record and Praat 6.0.18 was applied to annotate the recordings.The major findings are as follows:(1)General feature: the overall correctness of word stress of English majors is 65.19% in the production test and 75.12% in the perception test.The overall correct rate of word stress of non-English majors is 56.94% in the production test and 62.50% in the perception test.Chinese college EFL learners' production and perception of English stress should be improved.(2)Findings in the production test: the overall accuracy of word stress of English majors is higher than that of non-English majors;English majors' correct rate in every kind of word is higher than that of non-English majors except in noun phrases;there is a quantitative negative relationship in the correct rate of noun phrases and compound nouns;English majors and non-English majors output words ending with-tion and-sion better;English majors output multi-syllable words better than non-English majors;the difference in the correct rate of sentence stress between English majors and non-English majors is not obvious.(3)Findings in the perception test: the overall accuracy of word stress of English majors is higher than that of non-English majors;both English majors and non-English majors perceive two-syllable verbs better and perceive noun phrases less easily;the overall correct rate of English majors is higher than that of non-English majors in the perception of sentence stress.The results of this thesis reveal the current situation of Chinese English learners in English stress acquisition,which will be beneficial to enhance the teachers' understanding of learners' stress acquisition and provide some suggestions to improve teaching methods and effectiveness.