A Contrastive And Empirical Research On Intonation Features Of Fuzhou Efl Learners And Native American Speakers

English learning covers phonetics,vocabulary,and grammar.Among them,phonetics is the basic unit of language as well as the primary factor for research.The acquisition of English intonation indeed plays an indispensable role in English phonetic teaching.Intonation acquisition of English learners,however,is affected by the phonetic system of mother tongue.Under the framework of Autosegmental-Metrical(AM)theory and contrastive analysis theory,this study employs the method of instrumental phonetics to analyze the similarities and differences of the intonation features between English learners in the Fuzhou dialectal area and native American speakers,and explores in-depth reasons for the errors produced by learners,so as to provide reference for English phonetic teaching in the basic education stage of Fuzhou.The reading texts of this study are extracted from Asian English Speech Corpus Project-Chinese Academy of Social Sciences(AESOP-CASS).The subjects are selected from an ordinary high school in Fuzhou.A total of 20 people are selected,including 10 male and 10 female students,respectively.The same materials of 6 native American speakers are taken from AESOP-CASS as a reference.Nineteen types of English interrogative sentences are involved,consisting of general questions,special questions,alternative questions and tag questions.First,the recordings are manually segmented.Then the speech analysis software Praat is used to annotate them and extract the required fundamental frequency(F0)data.At last,the data is organized in detail with the help of Excel and SPSS.The results are visually presented in the form of tables and figures.The analysis of this research is conducted from the perspective of prominence pattern,phrasing pattern and final boundary tone pattern.This study points out three aspects of conclusions.Firstly,in terms of the stress prominence pattern,compared with native American speakers,Fuzhou English learners use stress excessively and incorrectly.Secondly,in terms of the intonation phrasing pattern,the pause produced by English learners is prone to be excessive and ill-used,which is the result from learners’ being affected by Chinese phonetic system and failing to segment utterances according to the requirements of grammar and syntax.Thirdly,as for the final boundary tone pattern,there is a significant difference between most Fuzhou English learners and native American speakers.Learners have a large number of falling tones with insufficient tonal values,which logically stems from the transfer influence of tones in Fuzhou dialect.This study enriches the intonation researches associated with AM theory and has pedagogical implications for English phonetic teaching in the Fuzhou dialectal area.First,teachers should moderately guide students to understand the cross-language differences of these phonetic systems,and stimulate students’ interest in spoken English.Next,based on the solid foundation of students’ basic skills,teachers not only formulate speech with typical syntactic structure for training,but also create appropriate pragmatic contexts for students as much as possible.Then the simple use of speech analysis software Praat can also help learners to realize speech visualization,so that they can face up and modify their own speech errors.Finally,it is best,for schools and teachers,to hold diverse activities for the sake of increasing students’ chances to truly practice their oral English.