An Empirical Study Of Primary School Students' Acquisition Of English Intonation

At present,primary school students' oral English studies mostly focus on phonetic exploration,and there is not much research on intonation,but too much reliance on intuition and experience,which is not convincing enough.When judging whether the intonation is correct,the subjectivity is too strong,while the empirical researches are rare.By combining phonetics,phonology and empirical researches,with experimental phonology methods,breaking the limitations of senses,based on the large-scale statistical data comparison of digitized audio and text,this study tries to analyze the characteristics of Chinese pupils' English intonation acquisition,and provide new ideas and specific methods of intonation teaching for primary school students.Based on the theory of experimental phonology,this study takes pupils' English intonation as the object,recording students' recitation of English texts,and building them into learner corpus;then build text-matching audio(read by native speakers)into native speakers corpus and analyze the two to discover similarities and differences in the three aspects of pitch,duration and intensity,in order to explore the characteristics of pupils' English intonation,which may indicate the pupils' intonation acquisition problems,and put forward solutions accordingly to make Chinese students' English intonation closer to their native speakers.The research results are as follows:1.From the point of view of intonation differences between learners and native speakers,the pitch is the most obviously different,followed by the duration,finally the intensity.2.The correlations between the pitch and sentence patterns are significantly higher than that of the intensity,and much higher than that of the duration.From the analysis of specific sentence patterns,we can see that the least obvious differences of the mean value of the pitch waviness between learners and native speakers lie in the special questions,followed by the general questions,and the most obvious differences lie in the declarative sentences.3.The comparison of the corpus data of pitch,duration and intensity indicates that in general,native speakers' intonations are more flexible,with more changes of waviness,stretches,pauses and stresses,and more emotional.While the learners' intonations are relatively straight,flat and mechanical.They lack emotions and appear to be not vivid and natural enough.Therefore,the intonation of native speakers can also carry information more,including not only text information,but also emotional information,which can be effectively used for communication.However,learners' intonations are less expressive and difficult to convey rich emotional information contained in the language.Even because of improper use of intonation,text information is also lost or even misread,which can not be effectively used for communication.The reasons for the above problems can be attributed to the learners' lack of intonation awareness,intonational theory knowledge,and some basic skills in English.They pay too much attention to the text itself,but little attention to the emotional and cultural background of language.Furthermore,they lack enough input of native spoken language corpus.To solve the problems,this paper suggests that English teachers and English learners should establish appropriate intonation awareness.Teachers shall prepare the students with simple intonational theory knowledge,enhance their reading comprehension ability,pay more attention to the emotion information and cultural background of language,and give the students a big input of standard intonations,preferably those from native speakers.