Study On The Application Of English Songs To Word Stress Teaching Of Junior High Schools

With the development of globalization,English,especially spoken English,plays increasingly important roles.However,the teaching focus has been placed on grammar instruction,vocabulary accumulation,and improvement of reading or writing skills over a long period of time.Suprasegmental teaching such as stress,intonation,and rhythm is always ignored by English teachers.The traditional phonetic teaching did not achieve satisfactory results.In the Curriculum Standard of Compulsory Education for English(Ministry of Education,2011),phonetic knowledge,vocabulary knowledge,and grammatical knowledge,are integrated in a whole and interacted with each other.Moreover,in the target description concerning language skills,there are corresponding requirements for stress perception and production.English stress plays important roles in meaning and emotion expression.Chinese learners,especially high school students,encounter difficulties in English stress acquisition.This thesis,based on the theories of Multiple Intelligence and Affective Filter Hypothesis,aims at studying the effects of the application of English songs to word stress teaching of junior high schools from the perspective of the acoustic features of English stress.What effects does the application of English songs to word stress teaching have on stress perception of junior high school students? What effects does the application of English songs to word stress teaching have on stress production of junior high school students? What effects does the application of English songs to word stress teaching have on emotion and attitudes of junior high school students?Forty students from a private junior high school in Dalian,Liaoning province were chosen as the research subjects,twenty of whom are in experimental class and twenty in the control class.The English songs were used to assist word stress teaching in the experimental class.As contrast,traditional teaching was used to teach English word stress in the control class.After 16-week experiment,the results show that students can distinguish the stressed vowels from the unstressed vowels by increasing the pitch,strengthening the intensity,and prolonging the duration of the stressed vowels.Moreover,students appear stronger learning motivation,more confidence,and lower learning anxiety.