Analysis Of Chinese High Vocational College Students' Difficulties In Learning English Suprasegmental Features And Teaching Methods

This paper centers on the study of English suprasegmental features and the analysis of Chinese high vocational college students' difficulties in learning suprasegmental features. It reports research describing Chinese high vocational college students' difficulties in learning suprasegmental features in the aspects of stress, rhythm, and intonation. On the basis of the research findings, it discusses the probable causes contributing to students' difficulties in learning Suprasegmental features: 1) In the current teaching of pronunciation, too much attention is paid to the segmental features (mainly consonants and vowels), while suprasegmental features are relatively neglected. 2) The differences in Suprasegmental features between English and Chinese yield negative transfer in students' learning suprasegmental features. Recognizing the problems in both learning and teaching suprasegmental features, this paper proposes countermeasures in teaching, with reference to Krashen's Monitor Theory and the theories on the necessity of formal instructions.This paper deals with suprasegmental features of speech of the kind commonly described as stress, rhythm, and intonation. Suprasegmental features are the significant features in English pronunciation, bearing the responsibility for message transmission in connected speech. While segmental features provide the framework of English speech, suprasegmental features can be said to provide its soul. Native speakers rely on suprasegmental features as much as or even more than segmental features to convey their ideas and attitudes.30 non-English major freshmen from Jinan Railway Polytechnic were required to read a passage of around 260 words and their readings were recorded. The researcher invited one English and two Chinese colleagues to listen to the participants' recorded speech and co-analyzed the problems they found. Error analysis was employed to analyze the collected data, to identify the problems in the participants' pronunciation in stress, rhythm, and intonation. The results of the data analysis demonstrate that:1) Stress. In the participants' recorded reading, obviously, single-syllable words presented no problems. As for the two- syllable words, participants could figure out the placement of stress in most of the words. However, when it came to homographs, most of them failed to judge the stress pattern. Problems also arose among polysyllable words. Most participants failed to adopt sentence stress to convey different semantic meanings.2) Rhythm. As for function words in the reading material, although there were a few words for which the participants had adopted the weak form, in the main they failed to use most of the weak forms. Students had little idea of weak forms of those function words in connected speech. As for linking, participants totally failed to link those phrases that should be linked.3) Intonation. Most of the participants knew how to use the primary tones of rising and falling to a satisfactory extent, and they knew the falling tone was adopted in declarative sentences, special questions, and imperative sentences. However, there was a tendency for the falling tone to be over adopted. Moreover, participants obviously had not grasped the concept of conveying their intended meaning (attitude) through adopting different tones.Following these results, this paper discusses the present teaching of English pronunciation and the reasons for students' difficulties in learning suprasegmental features.1) In the actual teaching of pronunciation, the most frequently used method is to start with phonetics, explaining terms such as articulators, identification of phonemes( vowels and consonants), and then directing learners to practice accurate articulation of every phoneme. It is assumed that students will make the various sounds in the English language with such practice. However, suprasegmental features like weak forms, linking, assimilation, stress, rhythm, intonations are thereafter briefly covered with only a few general words (Gao Jie, 2007). Some Chinese textbooks on pronunciation teaching explain vowels and consonants in great detail, while suprasegmental features only occupy a small proportion of the whole textbook. Few textbooks describe suprasegmental features adequately (Fang Lan, Wu Rangke, 2000). The commonly adopted method is, to some extent, effective in the teaching of pronunciation in that students could clearly identify specific phonemes absent in their mother tongue. However, it also presents some inevitable problems. The emphasis on single phonemes makes students pay so much attention to these in the early stage that they ignore the variants of some phonemes in connected speech. Therefore some suprasegmental features, such as weak forms, assimilation, and linking, are naturally neglected. Thus it is not surprising that students' pronunciation sounds quite unnatural and foreign to native speakers.2) Besides those teaching problems, another major factor affecting Chinese highvocational college students' difficulties in learning pronunciation is the negativetransfer from Chinese.In English, stress functions lexically and semantically. The important role of stress in English is beyond Chinese students' experience because stress doesn't have so high a degree of significance in Chinese. For example, word stress in English has the function of distinguishing noun from verb functions for the same homograph while in Chinese, what functions in distinguishing meaning is not stress but tone. Moreover, English word stress pattern is rather complex and, for almost all the rules about the placement of stress, there are large numbers of exceptions. Therefore Chinese students find stress rather sophisticated and undetectable.English has a stress- timed rhythm pattern, i.e., the time between stressed syllablesturns out to be roughly the same irrespective of the number of unstressed syllables. Inorder to achieve the effect of the alternation between strong or weak syllables, there are many pronunciation features in English like assimilation, elision, linking, and weak form that make English speech sound more rhythmical, more fluent and more natural. Chinese has a quite different rhythm pattern: syllable- timed pattern. That is, all syllables, whether stressed or unstressed, tend to occur at regular time-intervals and the time between stressed syllables will be shorter or longer in proportion to the number of unstressed syllables. Therefore while speaking English, Chinese students usually use all-strong-form pronunciation and give each syllable equal effort, which totally breaks the rhythm pattern of English and sounds unnatural.In tone languages, Chinese for example, pitch levels have phonemic significance. Such a system uses pitch levels quite differently from that encountered in English. Pitch in English does not signal phonemic distinction as it does in Chinese, but it does convey important information about a speaker's attitudes and emotional states. Intonation plays a role in discourse similar to that of gestures and other paralinguistic signals. Chinese learners have special difficulty in identifying the emotional states of speakers of English; most learners know how to use the primary tones of rising and falling satisfactorily, but there is a tendency for the falling tone to be over adopted; learners obviously had not understood how to convey their intended meaning (attitude) through adopting different secondary tones.Following this analysis, this paper concludes that suprasegmental features should occupy a crucial place in teaching pronunciation. Based on Krasheng's Monitor Theory and theories on the necessity of formal instruction, this paper proposes some countermeasures. Krashen(1981; 1982) claims that learners possess an "acquired system' and a 'learned system' which are totally separate. The former is developed by means of acquisition, a subconscious process which arises when learners are using language for communication. The latter is the result of learning, the process of paying conscious attention to language in an effort to understand and memorize rules. Krashen's distinction between 'acquisition' and 'learning' is particularly helpful, suggesting that the ideal EFL output depends on both acquired and learned knowledge.However, his argument of the impossibility of conversion from learning to acquisition and his 'zero option' advocating the abandonment of formal instruction are challenged by many studies. It is possible, however, that there are certain linguistic properties that cannot be acquired by L2 learners (especially adults) unless they receive instructions in them. Formal instruction results in increased accuracy and accelerates progress through developmental sequences. Also, its effects are, at least in some cases, durable. Formal instructions along with opportunities to experience the structures in communication appear to produce the best result.In teaching suprasegmental features of English, this paper holds that EFL teachers could carry out teaching activities from the perspective of 'learning system' and 'acquisition system'. For the learning system, students should master the necessary knowledge of the suprasegmental features of English, which largely depends on formal instruction by the teacher. For the acquisition system, teachers should provide as much natural input and communication context as possible to facilitate the acquisition of the suprasegmental features of English. This paper further proposes some specific countermeasures in teaching stress, rhythm, intonation respectively.Suprasegmental features of English speech are really important features that cannot be neglected in teaching English pronunciation. EFL Teachers who teach high vocational college English should take the responsibility of guiding students to focus on suprasegmental features, finding out problems that students meet in learning those features and figuring out the countermeasures accordingly.