An Analysis Of College English Learners' Stress Problems In English Pronunciation Learning

English pronunciation teaching and learning has been hotly discussed in today's English education.Individuals' purpose of learning English has been gradually transferred from being an exam winner to a competent user.Nevertheless,there is a gap that needs to be filled between English spoken by natives and by Chinese English learners,which is partly due to Chinese English learners' difficulties in stress assignment caused by the rhythmic difference between the two languages and learners' ignorance of suprasegmental features.However,correct stress assignment really matters in a successful communication,so stress problems Chinese English learners have now is set as the focus of this research.This research will select a group of college non-English majors as a sample to illustrate different kinds of problems.The author collects and processes sound samples,makes detailed acoustic analysis and data analysis of subjects' English stress problems from different perspectives including: 1)word stress,namely,the stress errors in single words with two or more syllables,in words with affixes,in compound words and in two-word noun phrases;also 2)sentence stress,i.e.,stress errors in content and function words,in pragmatic context such as repetition,rhythm,emphasis and contrast and in stress deviations based on the analysis of pitch,intensity and duration.This thesis is composed of five chapters: Chapter One,Introduction,provides the significance,the objectives,the originality and the organization of the thesis.Chapter Two,Literature Review,presents the basic concepts of the study,the related theories and previous studies on acquisition of L2 stress patterns.Chapter Three,Methodology,introduces in detail how the study was conducted and how the data were collected and analyzed.Chapter Four,Findings and Discussions,is the most significant part of the thesis.It reports the major findings,including Chinese English learners' stress problems in word stress and sentence stress referring to data analysis.Chapter Five,Conclusion,makes a summary of the major findings of the research and discusses some pedagogical implications.Also,some limitations will be pointed out in the end,wishing to give some useful suggestions for the future research.It is hoped that the thesis may cast light on English pronunciation teaching and learning in China,especially in the acquisition of English stress patterns.Thus,some pedagogical implications are given in the end.This thesis also tries to be helpful to further the research on Chinese college English learners' acquisition of suprasegmental features.