| Intonation is the soul of language.English intonation,as one of English suprasegmental parts(rhythm,pause,tone,accent),plays a significant role in daily communication and has an essential role in English language learning.With the continuous reform of Zhejiang Senior High School Entrance Examination(hereafter “SHSEE”),man-machine dialogue automatic testing would be adopted in English speaking test where pronunciation and intonation matter a lot.However,students' intonation competence is not satisfactory in current Chinese junior high classroom,which results from many reasons such as negative transfer from Chinese,English instructors' incompetence in intonation teaching(their own pronunciation and intonation are not qualified)and lack of instructional strategies of English intonation(EI).Under such background,the present research focuses on improving students' intonation competence by applying different instructional strategies of EI(explicit instructional strategies,contrastive strategies,kinesthetic strategies and other strategies).Therefore,the research questions would be as follows: 1)what are the general EI learning condition and students' attitudes towards EI strategies in current junior high school? 2)How can the writer effectively apply instructional strategies of EI in Junior High School? 3)In the course of strategy application,what are the common problems of students' intonation? 4)What are the results after applying these strategies? If the results were positive,it would prove the assumption that students' intonation competence and awareness can be improved by adopting effective instructional strategies of EI.This is a case study conducted in a local junior high school in Zhejiang Province where 8 participants with typical Chinglish pronunciation from Grade 8 Class 11& 12 are involved in this experiment(before the experiment,questionnaires were distributed to 84 students with 80 valid in order that the writer has a general understanding of the current intonation learning situations).The reason for choosing them is that it would be easier for comparing and can better reflect the effectiveness of the strategies concerned.Speech analytical software Praat is adopted in this experiment to compare the pitch contours from the participants' and native speakers'(participants' recordings are from pre-test and post-test while the native speakers' are from the textbook recordings).In the course of this experiment,the application of explicit instructional strategies adopts seven-step teaching model(Perception;Imitation;Discussion with Guided Discovery Method;Note-Taking / Marking;Consolidation;Communicative Activity;and Homework /Assessment)to give instructions of general intonation knowledge;contrastive strategies show the differences of Praat pitch contours between native speakers' and the participants';Kinesthetic strategies involve the gesture & facial muscles & whole body movement to acquire intonation;other strategies use music,mathematics and Fun Dubbing to assist the instruction of intonation.In the meanwhile,the writer figures out the specific intonation problems among the participants: 1)their intonation patterns don't have prosodic features(or ups and downs)and are rather flat because of Chinese negative transfer;2)they overly use the falling tone even in the non-final IPs or adverbials(e.g.first,second,etc.)where rising tone should be used according to the general rules;3)most of them tend to utter special questions with rising tone which is supposed to be opposite;4)they use the pauses randomly.The result of this study shows that students' intonation awareness and competence have improved a lot in terms of 3T's system(tonality,tonicity,tone)according to Praat pitch contours of participants' post-test in comparison with those of pre-test,which testifies the effectiveness of the instructional strategies of EI in this study and provides valuable reference for the future EI instruction in junior high schools. |
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