An Error Analysis Of English Stress By Junior High School Students

Pronunciation teaching has gathered more and more attention in English elementary education in recent years.The phenomenon of "Dumb English" has been brought to the forefront,which may mainly result from that students can't pronounce the words correctly.As a stress-timed language,English is a huge stone to Chinese learners whose mother tongue is syllable-timed language in acquiring because of the negative language transfer.Therefore,it is helpful to pronunciation teaching through studying English stress acquisition of Chinese learners.This case study takes Shanghai Experimental School as an example and randomly select 24 students as subjects to do the data analysis.The tool for phonetic analysis and annotation is Praat Microsoft.The problems of Chinese junior high school students' English stress acquisition were figured out according to the intensity and duration of the participants.In addition,the shape and the size of shaded area on the spectrum,the vibrating fluctuant change of the formant can reveal the stress acquisition problems.With the help of Office Excel 2016 and SPSS 24.0,the data statistics were carried out efficiently.The results of paper tests and recording experiments show that the main English stress acquisition problems of Chinese junior students lie in two aspects:word stress and sentence stress.With respect to word stress,the stress acquisition rate of homonyms is less than 25%.The polysyllabic words are stressed habitually.With regard to sentence stress,the acquisition rate of normal sentence stress is about 88%,but the oral accuracy is 30%or so.More worrying,the acquisition rate of sentences stress functional displacement is the lowest one.All the syllables in the same sentence have the convergent duration,and the rhythm of sentences stress is in chaos.According to the results,some teaching strategies have been raised.For example,teachers should improve their stress knowledge,distinguish English and Chinese stress clearly,cultivate students' sense of rhythm via English songs and analyze students' recording via Praat.In a word,this case study aims to provide some references on English elementary education of pronunciation.