An Investigation Into The Teaching Of English Suprasegmental Phonemes In A Junior High School

Speech sound,as the material basis of the existence of language,is not only the essence of language,but also the basis of language teaching.As an important part of speech,suprasegmental phonemes has a great influence on language flow.However,in the actual English teaching process,the phonological teaching has not been paid attention to for a long time,and suprasegmental phonemes teaching has been extremely ignored.Most of the current researches on suprasegmental phonemes focus on universities and high schools,and the research content focuses on the characteristic analysis of suprasegmental phonemes and related teaching strategies.There are not many studies on the teaching status of suprasegmental phonemes in junior high school,and the current ones are lack of practical research data support and substantial teaching suggestions.In view of this,this research attempts to investigate the situation of suprasegmental phonemes teaching and provide some useful suggestions for it.All the English teachers and students of grade seven and grade eight from a middle school in Haikou,Hainan Province are selected as the subjects of the research.Questionnaire survey,interview and classroom observation methods are adopted in this research.Both teachers and students fill out the questionnaire and are interviewed respectively,the purpose of which is to explore the following four questions for this research:Q1: How much do junior high English teachers understand suprasegmental phonemes?Q2: How do junior high English teachers teach suprasegmental phonemes?Q3: What are junior high school students’ perceptions of the suprasegmental phonemes teaching?Q4: What may be the main problems with suprasegmental phonemes teaching in junior high school?There are four important findings.Firstly,most of the junior high school English teachers have a general understanding of the content of suprasegmental phonemes but most of them don’t know what the term is when only its name is mentioned.Secondly,most of the teachers use no more than two methods to teach suprasegmental phonemes,among which the direct imitation method is used most.As for students’ mistakes in suprasegmental phonemes,most of the teachers often correct them appropriately.Thirdly,most of the students think that their teachers’ teaching of suprasegmental phonemes is easy to understand,but they hope the teaching methods can be various.Lastly,there are some problems with suprasegmental phonemes teaching,such as inadequate phonological literacy of suprasegmental phonemes;monotonous teaching method of suprasegmental phonemes;insufficient teaching time for suprasegmental phonemes and so on.Based on the above findings,this research further puts forward some suggestions to junior high school suprasegmental phonemes teaching,which aim to help front-line English teachers clarify the teaching content and teaching objectives of suprasegmental phonemes and improve suprasegmental phonemes teaching.