EFL Learners' Problems In The Acquisition Of Suprasegmental Features

Pronunciation plays an important role in facilitating communication;therefore,the training of pronunciation should be regarded as an integral part of language teaching.The present study compared the recordings of the EFL learners and those of the native speakers,looked for the differences between them and explored the common errors made by the EFL learners in their acquisition of the suprasegmental features.SPPAS was applied to annotate sentences into syllables and phonemes.Praat was utilized to extract all kinds of values and draw pitch contours.Microsoft Excel sheet was employed to do the calculation.The major finding of this study was that some common errors were made by the EFL learners on all the aspects of suprasegmental features.Major findings based on the results of the data analysis are listed as below:(1)Stress.The EFL learners stressed much more frequently than native speakers not only on content words but also on functional words.They tend to produce stressed syllables with higher F0 and shorter duration.(2)Rhythm.Rhythmic patterns produced by the EFL learners were more syllable-timed than stress-timed.(3)Intonation.The EFL learners tend to produce more falling intonation and have difficulty with rising and inflexional tones.When they used the right intonation as the native speakers did,the F0 ranges were smaller compared with those produced by the native speakers.Following the above analysis,conclusion could be made that language transfer was the main cause for the EFL learners' errors made in the acquisition of suprasegmenatal features This paper recommended more efforts be put on the teaching of suprasegmentals.Instructors should be aware of the crucial role of suprasegmentals and give formal instructions on the knowledge of suprasegmentals.What's more,the instructors should provide natural and communication context materials for the EFL learners to imitate.