A Study On Fuzhou EFL Learners' English Intonation Acquisition

English utterances are endowed with distinct meanings by intonation.Hence,the acquisition of intonation occupies a significant part of second language acquisition.But there exists an obvious gap between the levels of intonation of native speakers and Chinese EFL(English as Foreign Language)learners.Not only will the tones of Chinese exert influences on the acquisition of English intonation,diverse Chinese dialects also are involved in the process of acquisition in different degrees.Consequently,the acquisition of English intonation is hard for EFL learners.To investigate the problems of Fuzhou EFL learners' intonation and improve the situations,this study is going to compare and analyze the reading materials of native speakers and Fuzhou EFL learners on the grounds of Three-T theory in the acoustic comparative way.Potential reasons are put forward based on the language transfer theoryEight native speakers and thirty Fuzhou EFL learners are chosen from AESOP-CASS-FJ(Asian English Speech Corpus Project-Chinese Academy of Social Sciences-Fujian)as research subjects.The chosen reading materials contain six common sentence patterns which come to fifteen sentences in total.These recordings with annotations of Praat are further compared and interpreted from tonality,tonicity and tone severally referring to the three levels of Halliday's Three-T theory.The characteristics are summarized as the following points through the annotation and statistical analysis.Firstly,in light of tonality,the results reveal conspicuous variances between native speakers and Fuzhou EFL learners.Fuzhou EFL learners are inclined to speak with shorter and more tone groups.The majority of Fuzhou EFL learners tend to achieve division between adjacent tone groups mainly by the pause.Secondly,unmarked tonicity takes up a relatively large portion.However,the concrete distributions of nucleuses are broad and baseless to some extent with average energy.In Fuzhou EFL learners' utterances,roughly every word is accented with identical pitch,intensity and duration.With the transfer of abundant tone sandhis in Fuzhou dialect,Fuzhou EFL learners utter words with shorter duration.Thirdly,Fuzhou EFL learners are able to apply basic rising tone and falling tone to distinguish meanings.Distinct discrepancies appear concerning further specific tones.In addition,Fuzhou EFL learners' pitch contours are lack of necessary ups and downs with the influences of language transfer.Some Fuzhou EFL learners would like to choose inappropriate level tone to express implied meanings.Fourthly,EFL learners in Fuzhou show poor awareness of intonation.They can't apply knowledge about intonation flexibly to convey information.Several pieces of advice on the English intonation teaching are raised in accordance with the above features and problems.To raise and strengthen learners' awareness of intonation and knowledge about intonation,specialized courses should be set.What's more,it's necessary and momentous to enable EFL learners to perceive the acoustic discrepancies by designing perceptual training containing high variability of materials.In addition,substantial exercises should be provided for consolidating accordingly.