A Phonetic Study On Pauses In Changchun English Learners’ Passage Reading

Right now,in China,there are approximately 300 million EFL(English as a foreign language)learners.Even though they start learning English at a very young age and most of them have been learning English for more than ten years,a lot of them are trapped in a dilemma called "dumb English" and according to the 2019 EF English Proficiency Index,less than 10 million Chinese speak English fluently.What is more,EFL learners of different dialect areas,influenced by their mother tongue,exhibit different phonetic problems.Changchun EFL leaners,as the representatives of speaking the Songliao subgroup of the northeast mandarin,due to the transfer of their mother tongue,produce featured oral English.How to improve their oral proficiency deserves the attention of linguists and English educators.Pauses,primarily considered to be "periods of silence in the speech of a person",on the one hand,are the most easily perceived elements that influence a listener’s judgment on a speaker’s speech.On the other hand,pauses are also,along with other temporal variables,the most fundamental and reliable indexes in assessing the proficiency of EFL learners.Fluent oral English is often associated with moderate use of pauses that are located in the right positions and are neither too long nor too short.Overused pauses segregate grammar components while inadequate pauses destroy the independence of intonational phrases;long pauses bring in hesitation while short ones result in anxiety;pauses in inappropriate locations give false implication to the listener and transmit wrong information.Consequently,incorrect or inappropriate pauses not only give the impression of low proficiency but also impede English learning and influence communication.Pauses in both L1 and L2 speeches have been studied widely and thoroughly,and remarkable achievements have been made.However,most studies focus on the duration and the frequency of pauses,and seldom analyze their location.These studies believe that pauses are a normal phenomenon and a reliable measurement of oral fluency,but they rarely discuss the features of the pauses and pause errors.The current study compares the frequency,the duration and the location of pauses in Changchun EFL learners’ reading with those in native speakers’ reading,trying to summarize their pause patterns and pause errors within the framework of information structure theory,and also attempting to give possible reasons for their occurrence under the guidance of language transfer theory.The current study puts forward the following research questions:(1)What are the pause patterns in terms of the frequency,the duration and the location of pauses in Changchun EFL learners’ passage reading compared with those in native speakers’ reading?(2)What are the pause errors made by Changchun EFL learners in their reading?(3)What are the possible reasons accounting for the occurrence of such features and pause errors?In order to answer these questions,this study chooses from AESOP corpus the reading of ten Changchun EFL learners and ten native English speakers(five males and five females respectively).The reading material is a fairy tale composed of 749 words called Cinderella.The study then labels their orthographic tier in Praat(acoustic analysis software)according to IViE(conventions for transcribing and annotating the prosody of speech).A script is run to collect data concerning the frequency,the duration and the location of pauses.These data are further analyzed by Excel and SPSS.The pause patterns concerning the frequency,the duration and the location of pauses are summarized.Pause errors are listed within the framework of information structure theory.Then possible reasons for their occurrence are given under the guidance of language transfer theory.By comparing the frequency,the duration as well as the location of pauses in Changchun EFL learners’ reading with those in native speakers’ reading,the current study finds out:(1)The pauses in Changchun EFL learners’ reading are characterized by "high frequency,short duration and random locations".The overall frequency of pauses in their reading speeches is higher than that in the native speakers’ reading speeches.The frequency of each kind of pauses of Changchun EFL learners,except for pauses between sentences,is higher than that of the native speakers.Furthermore,the overall duration of pauses in their reading is generally shorter than that in native speakers’ reading.Changchun EFL learners pause shorter than native speakers both at junctures and non-junctures.What is more,Changchun EFL learners make more pause errors than native speakers.The proportion of pauses within phrases,pauses within words,and pauses in other locations in Changchun EFL learners’ reading is relatively higher.The location of pauses in Changchun EFL learners’ reading is less predictable and more random.Their occurrences in Changchun EFL learners’ reading depend on the specific speaker.It is hard to find any applicable patterns for all the subjects.(2)Changchun EFL learners make pause errors within words,phrases and in other places.Pause errors within words occur within polysyllabic adjectives and nouns,within verbs in the past participle or past tense(before “-ed”)as well as within plural nouns.Changchun EFL learners also make pause errors within noun phrases(noun + noun)and also within verbal phrases composed of past participle or past tense and prepositions.Pause errors in other locations are more random and unexpected.They result from omitting pauses within parallel structures and improper performance of elision.And there are also pause errors before and behind the infinitive marker “to”,conjunctions,relative pronouns,as well as relative adverbs.(3)The pause errors made by Changchun EFL learners can be mainly attributed to the negative transfer of Chinese.The difference between English and Chinese is responsible for the occurrence of pause errors in Changchun EFL learners’ reading.The majority of Chinese words are monosyllabic,while the majority of English words are polysyllabic.Chinese is a "syllable-timed" language,while English is a "stress-timed" language.Chinese is a tone language,while English is an intonation language.Chinese is a paratactic language that does not highly rely on sentence structure to express meaning.By contrast,English is a hypotactic language,and sentence structure is very important for expressing meaning.Changchun EFL learners emphasizing the precise pronunciation of every word and their obstacles in analyzing the information structure of long sentences also result in pause errors.The current study summarizes the features of pauses in Changchun EFL learners’ reading,analyzes pause errors under the guidance of information structure theory and gives possible reasons from the perspective of language transfer theory.It provides a brief presentation of Changchun EFL learners’ performance of pauses in expectation that it might help EFL learners to improve their oral fluency and shed some light on further studies.