An Empirical Study On The Cultivation Of English Intonation Proficiency From The Context Perspective

With the rapid development of globalization in recent years, the cultivation of language communicative proficiency has been attached great importance to. But at the same time, in cross-language and cross-cultural communication, problems derived from the process of bilingual understanding have also gradually attracted people’s attention. Chinese and English are the two difference language systems therefore, when communicating with English native speaker (NSs), the improper El patterns utilized by Chinese often caused the communication failure.Meanwhile, with the emphasis placed into El in Chinese language teaching, the trend of "focusing on pronunciation and ignoring English intonation (EI)" has been reversed quite a lot. More and more people have begun to concern about how to employ appropriate El patterns based on context to effect the communication satisfaction. At present, the phonetic teaching in China has not only focused on cultivating the awareness of El, also begun to explore the close relationship between EI, El function and context in the sense to improve the pragmatic proficiency for Chinese EFL learners.Based on the above, the present study is to take the English major students in a local university as subjects and undertake the empirical study from the perspective of context which combines the reading aloud activity and natural flow interview that few did in China at present. The study aims to explore the problems and changes of Chinese EFL learners’ context-based El patterns after the experiment teaching in order to provide the references and suggestions for the reform of Chinese phonetic teaching and ultimately improve EFL learners’ pragmatic communication proficiency.This study, based on Halliday’s (1963) El theory and El theories of Chun (2002),Tench (1996) and Wells (2006) as well as the domestic research discoveries of El in recent years and from the perspective of context, is conducted to analyze the in-depth relation between the context. El and El function and involve45English majors as experimental subjects to demonstrate the problems and changes in their El patterns.The present study attempts to answer the three questions as follows:1) What is the close relation between context. El and El function?2) What is the awareness of CSs’ context. El and El function from survey before the experiment teaching?3) What are the changes and problems in CSs’El function selections and El patterns based on context in the reading aloud activity and spontaneous interview after the experiment teaching?The study illustrates that context largely restricts the selections of El features and functions; meanwhile El also helps to shape the formation of context. The relation between the two is intertwined; after the experimental teaching, CSs’ awareness of context-based El function has been strengthened greatly. The CSs’El patterns in reading aloud and interview are much closer to NSs’. Therefore, CSs’El pragmatic proficiency in specific context has been enhanced. And the specific changes are as follows:1) In the acquisition of El functions, the overall performance for CSs has been improved. As to the four functions investigated, they do best with the attitudinal function, and do worst in the informational function of El.2) In dividing IP, CSs’abilities to divide IP and reduce accent in single IP based on context have been strengthened quite a lot.3) In tonicity, CSs’sensitivity to select nucleus based on context has been improved greatly. More students become aware of accenting new and important information, deaccenting given and insignificant information, contrastivity and emphasis, but the performance is worse in CSs’delaying much longer in discourse pause and employing a lot of excessive modal particles, such as "en","well","and", etc.4) In handling nucleus tone, the obvious improvement can be seen from CSs’ability to select the basic nucleus tone based upon context.The above mentioned problems and relations involved in the experiment teaching still need the further exploration and analysis in the future follow-up experiment teaching and thus put forward the related counter measures.