On The Development Of Junior High Students’ Intonation Ability In Reading Aloud

English pronunciation plays an important role in oral communication.With the implementation of the reform of English listening and speaking test of the high school entrance examination,pronunciation training has been paid more attention to English teachers.Reading aloud is one of the key methods of pronunciation training for teachers.While many of them attach great importance to the training of students’ pronunciation,they neglect students’ development of intonation and connected speech.Consequently,students can pronounce each English word correctly,but their English pronunciation still sounds not satisfactory.This is due to the fact that students are influenced by the mother tongue so they habitually use the tone of Chinese as the intonation of English when reading aloud,which shows that students lack certain intonation awareness and intonation application ability.Therefore,in order to improve students’ intonation ability,it is necessary for teachers to conduct intonation teaching to improve students’ intonation awareness and ability.Based on the situation mentioned above,this study took 40 junior high school students as the subjects for teaching experiments.By comparing the students’ pretest and posttest intonation performance,this thesis analyzed to what extent the intonation teaching improved students’ intonation ability,so as to explore the effectiveness of intonation teaching on the improvement of students’ intonation ability.This thesis also attempted to provide the reference and the suggestion for English intonation teaching in junior high school.The results of the pre-test and questionnaire showed that the students lacked certain intonation ability.Due to the lack of systematic intonation knowledge and training,students’ general intonation awareness was insufficient.Students paid little attention to intonation when reading.The students’ overall ability of using intonation was also weak because they didn’t know how to apply it to their reading.Due to the influence of mother tongue,students’ reading intonation was monotonous and lacked prosodic feature of English.The teaching design of this study was mainly based on the intonation theory of Wells(2006)and Roach(2008),and combined the relevant achievements of domestic scholars on intonation teaching research.According to the intonation situation of students,the systematic intonation teaching was implemented from three aspects of tonality,tonicity and tone(the 3Ts).The posttest results showed that after teaching,students’ overall intonation awareness and intonation application ability had been significantly improved,especially their abilities in the selection of nucleus and tone.It shows that teaching under the framework of 3T theory was effective for improving junior high students’ intonation ability.