An Experimental Study Of Using Movie Materials To Improve Senior High School Students' English Pronunciation At The Suprasegmental Level

Pronunciation teaching has a long history in western countries. Nowadays, pronunciation and phonetics teaching has aroused more and more linguists'attention. In China, with the increasing popularity of English, the position of English teaching has also been raised. However, as for the senior high school students'pronunciation, more attention should have been paid, because it may lead to learning difficulty in their future English study in college if they do not lay a solid base of English pronunciation. In some senior high schools, even if some importance is attached to it, pronunciation and phonetics teaching has been concentrating on perfecting vowels and consonants which belong to the segmental level with the traditional and mechanical methods which make students bored and lack of interest. Actually, good stress, rhythm and intonation which belong to the suprasegmental features can completely reveal one's English pronunciation capability, though it is hard to teach and learn them.On the basis of Krashen's Input Hypothesis and Swain's Output Hypothesis, the author proposes that movie-aided approach to teach the English pronunciation at the suprasegmental level. Compared with traditional pronunciation teaching, movie-aided teaching approach can create an easy and wonderful atmosphere for the students to learn. It is a multimedia method which combines watching, listening and speaking and can broaden the channel of knowledge.The study aims at finding a more effective and practical approach to improve students'English pronunciation teaching and learning.The thesis is based on the experimental study. A group of 37 students from two parallel classes of grade one in Hohhot No.2 Senior High School. During the experiment, various activities were designed for the students to practise their pronunciation.In order to test the validity of the experiment, the data were collected through a pre-test, a post-test and a questionnaire, of English pronunciation. After analyzing the results form the survey study and experimental study with the software SPSS Statistics 17.0, a tentative conclusion was reached that all the students achieved great improvement in their pronunciation at the suprasegmental level. Furthermore, using movie materials could well motivate the students.