A Case Study On Yanbian Korean Students' English Intonation

The research object of this paper is the English reading intonation uttered by Yanbian Korean college students. These students' first language is Korean and they were educated all through in Korean before college. Based on Halliday's analysis that intonation is a complex of three systemic variables, this paper is divided into three parts to illustrate:tonality, tonicity and tone, by which features of Korean college students' English intonation is described. The author also seeks to investigate whether their English intonation is influenced by the prosody of their mother tongue, i.e. Korean language, and tries to discuss and discover whether, why and how the negative transfer is done when they speak English.By analyzing and transcribing the pitch contour extracted from Praat, it comes to the conclusion that Korean students' intonation differs from native speakers on the basis of those three respects, tonality, tonicity and tone:First, students tend to over-divide a sentence into more tone groups than native speakers, and the pitch contours are always disintegrated. They usually do tonality only by pausing rather than native speakers' using multi-ways like anacrusis and pitch reset, etc. As for tonicity, non-native speakers do it in an inflexible way, they usually stress on a syllable through their deep-rooted grammatical knowledge without referring to the context. They perform much better in simple sentences than the grammatically complex ones, because of their unfamiliarity with English prosody. Thus the nucleus of an utterance is not so salient and curves of the pitch are also too flat to contrast the accented and unaccented parts. Again they tend to place the first word of a sentence as the sentence stress. As for the tone, students over-use falling tone and level tone but use rising tone in a very unnatural way or just simply avoid the rising tone. Moreover, their tones tend to be low, which results in the narrowness of the pitch range.There are some similarities between my findings in this paper and other scholars' researches on intonation, at home and abroad (Wang,2003; Juhani Toivanen,2003;陈桦2008,etc.). Thus this study may be another case in point to support Verdugo's hypothesis (2003) which illustrates there may be an interlanguage intonation system. This study also can serve for English education at Yanbian, for teachers may refer to the features of Korean students' English intonation to correct and direct their students, thus helping them to improve their English pronunciation.