Analysis Of The Acquisition Of Chinese Efl Learners’ English Intonation System From The Perspective Of Interlanguage Theory

Intonation,as an important suprasegmental feature,is of great significance in conveying meaning,and plays an irreplaceable role in daily communication.Each language has intonation,and wrongly-used intonation will cause unnecessary misunderstanding,for it still carries certain meaning.However,the study of intonation acquisition has not been paid enough attention in the field SLA.Compared with the L2 research in vocabulary,grammar and semantics,interlanguage theory,an important theory of SLA,is relatively less used in the study of L2 phonology.Interlanguage is a unique language system of L2 learners,which is structurally in the middle state of L1 and L2,and with the development of learning,it gradually approaches to the correct form of the target language.From the view of phonology,the phonological system of interlanguage receives the characteristics of both L1 and L2,no matter at segmental level or suprasegmental level.Therefore,interlanguage theory is closely related to L2 phonological acquisition,including the acquisition of L2 intonation.Based on previous empirical studies and interlanguage theory,the present study makes a contrastive analysis of the different intonation systems of Chinese and English,and adopts qualitative research method to analyze the interlanguage intonation system of Chinese EFL learners,aiming to have a positive influence on the acquisition of English intonation,so as to make it closer to the native speakers.This paper specifically addresses the following three questions:1.What kind of influence does Chinese intonation have on English intonation acquisition?2.What factors can lead to Chinese EFL learners’ interlanguage intonation?3.What implications does interlanguage intonation have to the acquisition of Chinese EFL learners’ intonation?The research shows that for most Chinese EFL learners,their English intonation acquired appears similar characteristics with only a few differences betweenindividuals.The emergence of these particular features in learners is not accidental,but an indispensible process in acquiring of English intonation,which exactly reflects the general characteristics of their interlanguage intonation system.The contrastive analysis of intonation patterns in Chinese and English finds that Chinese EFL learners’ interlanguage intonation interacts with their mother tongue,and the negative transfer of their L1 is the main reason of its formation.Moreover,the unique pause,stress and lexical tone patterns of Chinese respectively have a prominent negative impact on the tonality,tonicity and tone of interlanguage intonation.In terms of the analysis and explanation of the intonation system acquired,three implications for effective acquisition of English intonation are proposed.First,correctly understanding the system of interlanguage intonation can effectively avoid the negative effects of L1.Second,to improve the language awareness of L2 is helpful to acquire a new intonation system.Last,systematically mastering the relevant rules of English intonation system enables the acquisition of it to achieve twice the result with half the effort.The author hopes that the current research can arouse people’s attention to the study of interlanguage intonation as well as L2 intonation acquisition.In addition,learners can be enlightened to correctly treat the errors in intonation acquiring,and avoid the influence of mother tongue from the root,so as to more effectively acquire English intonation.