Chapter One Introduction
1.1 The Background of the Study
As a language used worldwide, or lingua franca, English plays a more and moreimportant role in international communication. And proper pronunciation of English isan important criterion used to test its proficiency, especially for EFL learners who majorin English. Standard pronunciation distinguishes them from those non-English majors.In recent years，much emphasis is attached to phonetic instruction across universitiesand colleges in China. Improvement in college students' oral English production isobvious, but the 'foreign accent' phenomenon still exists. This is because currently,phonetic education focuses more on segmental features, that is，it guides students tograsp correct pronunciation of vowels, consonants and individual words rather than thesuper-segmental features, such as stress, rhythm, and intonation in sentence and speechin daily communication.English intonation refers to "the variation in pitch" (O'Connor & Arnold, 1973: 1).Some rhyme factors such as pitch, loudness, speech rate, pause and tone vary in speechso that some necessary messages can be conveyed. In other words，"intonation servesthe backbone，’ (Ladd, 1996: 6). Gui Cankim mentioned that vowels and consonants arebody of English pronunciation; however，intonation is more of its soul (Gui，1985)、Therefore, in daily communication, perfect intonation is of great importance. Imperfectintonation may not only lead to ‘foreign accent，，what is more, it may convey a wrong1 All the cited Chinese literature in this study is trai^lated by the present author.
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1.2 The Purpose and Significance of the Study
The author conducts this study out of two reasons. Its theoretical significance isreflected in the following two aspects:Firstly, phonetics has always been an important area in linguistic studies. And mostphonetic studies focus on researching segmental features, studying the vowel,consonants, and pronunciation of a certain language. However in this thesis, the authorfocuses on the super-segmental features of EFL learners, a complement to segmentalphonetic studies.Secondly, previous studies describe the pronunciation features only by acousticjudgments, however in this thesis，a quantitative approach is adopted to try to avoidpossible subjectivity. Results of this study may be more persuasive.In addition, this study is also of practical significance. Through comparing therecordings of English native speakers and Chinese learners majored in English, thesuper-segmental patterns of EFL learners can be revealed. From students' perspective,they may become more aware of their problems in pronunciation, helping them improvetheir pronunciation and from native English speakers' perspective, they may instructtheir students' pronunciation more effectively on the basis of the super-segmentalfeatures as revealed by this study.
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Chapter Two Literature Review
2.1 Studies on Chinese EFL learners' Super-segmental Features
At present, studies on the super-segmental features of Chinese EFL learners mainlyfocus on two aspects. One adopts empirical approach and another is qualitative studieswhich discuss super-segmental features theoretically. For a long time, Chinese English teachers especially those who teach oral Englishhave been aware that it is very hard for Chinese EFL learners to master Englishpronunciation correctly. They summarize the errors made in Chinese EFL learners'pronunciation based on their teaching experience. Chen (2002) claimed that intonationis the most difficult for learners and the major problems in Chinese EFL learners'pronunciation are: (1) too flat，without any obvious stress and weakening; (2) lack ofvariation in tunes; and (3) inappropriate pause which causes an unnatural rhythm.Wang and Po (2009) studied the pitch movement pattern of Chinese EFL learners andfound that in a sentence，the pitch of the beginning syllable is always the highest andthe pitch of the ending syllable is the lowest，and the pitch movements of syllables inbetween are lack of variation.
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2.2 Studies on Foreign EFL Learners' Super-segmental Features
Different from studies in China, foreign researchers depend more on experimentalapproaches to study the English phonetics. Leed (1965) and Fakuade (1991) comparedEnglish super-segmental features respectively with Russian and Jukin, a languagespoken by a group of people in Africa. The former showed that it was easy todistinguish the tone type of interrogative sentences and declarative sentences betweenRussian and English. However the emotion the sentences convey was hard to tell. Thelatter indicated that due to the absence of stress in Jukin, it was hard for Jukin EFLlearners to grasp English intonation.Verdugo (2003) studied the intonation patterns of Spanish EFL learners. TwentySpanish EFL learners and 10 native English speakers were chosen as test subjects. Theresults of this four-year longitudinal study indicated that the super-segmental features oflearners were different from those of native speakers: (1) Spanish EFL learners'intonation unit involved more feet; (2) the pitch range of their nucleus was narrow; and(3) their basic tones were similar to those of native speakers but their flat tones wereoverused which caused difficulty in conveying accurate information. Due to anotherstudy he conducted in 2005, he also found out that learners would use a falling tone toexpress certain information instead of a falling-rising tone,
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Chapter Three Methodology.......... 11
3.1 Research Foundation......... 11
3.1.1 ToBI Labeling ......... 11
3.1.2 Theoretical Framework of ToBI ......... 14
3.1.3 Advantage and Disadvantage of To BI Labeling......... 17
3.2 Research Design.......... 18
3.3 Summary .........24
Chapter Four Results and Discussion......... 26
4.1 Results .........26
4.2 Discussion......... 39
4.3 Summary ......... 47
Chapter Five Conclusion .........48
5.1 Major Findings ......... 48
5.2 Pedagogical Implications......... 49
5.3 Limitations and Recommendations of Future Studies......... 50
Chapter 4Results and Discussion
4.1 Results
To answer the questions asked for this study, the EFL learners' prosodic featuresare analyzed from three aspects: prominence, phrasing and tunes. Pitch accents refers tothe words being prominent than the neighboring words in ToBI labeling system.Prominence is thus represented by the occurrence of pitch accent. As mentioned in 3.3.1，the intervals that occur in break index tier symbolize phrasing of intonation phrase，inother words, the segmentation of an utterance. And the different combinations of pitchaccent, phrase accent and boundary describe the pitch contours of an utterance whichcan be interpreted as the tune performance. In this study, pitch accents, intervals in thebreak index tier and different combinations of pitch accent, phrase accent and boundaryare used to represent three different aspects of super-segmental features. The results ofthis study are presented by comparing the three aspects of super-segmental featuresrespectively between EFL learners and native English speakers,
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Conclusion
This is the concluding chapter of Ae thesis. It starts with the major findings of thestudy and answers the research questions concerning the super-segmental features ofprominence, phrase and tune. It then puts forward some pedagogical implications forfuture English instructors to teach pronunciation based on the results of this study. Itends with limitations of this study and recommendations for future studies, hoping toprovide some insights for future researchers. This study aims at discovering the super-segmental features of 28 EFL learnerswho are senior English majors from a public university in Zhejiang Province. In thestudy, they are asked to record an article and the recordings serve as the data for thisstudy. The same recording material read by three native English speakers is taken asreference. ToBI transcribing system on PRAAT is adopted to analyze thesuper-segmental features of prominence pattern (the stress), phrasing pattern and tuneselection pattern. The main findings are presented as follows.
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Reference (omitted)
