Suprasegmental-Oriented Instruction Of English Pronunciation In Senior Middle School

For many years, it is generally acknowledged by the language educators that pronunciation teaching is an essential part of language courses. With the development and popularization of the communicative approach, more attention has been paid to the teaching of pronunciation. For the complexity of its influential factors, pronunciation teaching has been ignored for a long time. So, it is an urgent task to find an effective way to improve the communicative competence of learners in the pronunciation classes.This study, with a view to reappraising pronunciation teaching contribution to English language teaching for second language learners, attempts to introduce a new way of English pronunciation teaching-Suprasegmental-Oriented Instruction. So it is necessary to carry out such a study in this area. This teaching mode, including seven stages, i.e. perception, discussion and explanation, presentation, notation of the phonetic features and imitation, practice activities, communicative activities and assessment, plays a monitoring and supervising role during the pronunciation teaching process. So the present study, taking Communicative Language Teaching and Suprasegmentals as a starting point and based on the classroom teaching practice, puts forward the three hypotheses:(1) There are close correlations between segmental phonemes and suprasegmental phonemes; (2) Segmental phonemes can help students build a firm foundation for pronunciation; (3) The application of SOI can promote students' pronunciation ability and communicative intelligibility. To verify the hypotheses, this experimental study lasted one semester from September 2009 to January 2010. Sixty eight senior middle school students from Comprehensive Senior High School of Laiwu were sampled and equally divided into two groups, i.e. an experimental group and a controlled group. After the tests and treatment, data were collected and input into SPSS for Comparison and Correlation Analysis and Independent Samples Test.The results of the data analysis support the hypotheses. Correlation analysis indicates that segmental phonemes play a basic part in students'pronunciation learning, and there are close correlations between segmentals and suprasegmentals. And descriptive analysis shows that the average scores of the experimental group were much higher than that of the control group and the performance of the experimental group students in terms of their suprasegmentals, including stress, rhythm and intonation, was all better than that of the controlled group. Besides, Independent samples test proves that the treatment produces an obvious effect and contributes much to the promotion of the subjects'pronunciation ability. Therefore, students'pronunciation level has been improved after SOI has been incorporated into the teaching of experimental class for about twenty weeks. SOI is a more effective approach of teaching pronunciation in senior middle school than the traditional way.Although this research was carefully designed and implemented, there were still some limitations, such as a small scale of only 68 subjects and the limited time of the experiment. More scientific follow-up research must be conducted to determine whether SOI is effective under different conditions. And further practice is needed to perfect the theory. However, the study, as a exploratory experimental study, has achieved the anticipated results and reflected the advantages of SOI in pronunciation teaching, so it has the great significance of theory and pedagogy.