| Very few previous researches have their focus on thesuprasegmental features of English Phonetics from the perspective ofquantitative analysis. The core problem to be studied in this thesis isconnected speech, one of the suprasegmental aspects apart fromintonation. In order to get familiar with what the current situation ofChinese EFL learners’ pronunciation is, of course in terms of connectedspeech, a deviational analysis on this particular issue is launched,comparing the connected speech of some Chinese students fromSenior High School Affiliated to SHNU with that of the RP native speakers.Both groups of subjects are given several small passages covering allthe features of connected speech including rhythm, assimilation, elisionand linking, and they are required to read them out with theirrecordings being made into samplings for further data analysis. Duringthe process of this comparative quantitative analysis, the phoneticanalyzer Praat is introduced and with the aid of it, the whole researchand data analysis can be carried out and dealt with more scientificallyand more precisely. Lots of findings are demonstrated by acousticgraphs such as amplitude, intensity, pitch and spectrum, etc. andillustrated by the measured data generated by Praat. The result of theexperiment of Chinese students is far from satisfactory. And then, quitea few L2acquisition theories, for instance, fossilization of interlanguage,negative transfer of the mother tongue, lack of focus-on-form teachingmethodology in daily classroom teaching, etc. have been employed totry to explain why Chinese students failed to produce various kind ofconnected speech. Finally, from the vintage point of intensiverepetition, the author attempts to bring forward some suggestions forimproving the current situation of pronunciation teaching in middleschools in China. |
