A Survey Of Junior High School English Teachers' Cognition And Practice Of Supersegment Features

Suprasegmental Features,as a compulsory part of the phonetic knowledge of junior high school students,plays an important role in English learning.English teachers,whose understanding of superasegmentals(knowledge and teaching attitude)and teaching practice are closely related to students’ superasegmental knowledge acquisition,are the main instructors of English learners.One of the important tasks faced by junior high school English teachers are to hold correct attitudes with understanding clearly the importance of Suprasegmental Features instruction,and specify the Suprasegmental Features teaching system,create a favorable learning environment and atmosphere for learners,and enhance learning motivation and their English oral speaking quality.Therefore,systematic investigation into English teachers’ command of suprasegmental knowledge,attitude towards it and teaching performance in practice is an important issue that needs to be paid attention to in junior high school English teaching.This study,based on the previous researches findings in the field of Suprasegmental Features both at home and abroad,guided by the “input hypothesis” theory,aims to investigate junior high school English teachers’ perception and application of the Suprasegmental Features and their performance in teaching practice,and influence on students’ English learning,so as to reconstruct a high-quality and effective junior high school English classes.Accordingly,the study has made a survey among 5 English teachers and their 5 classes(225 students)in a junior high school of a city of Shandong Province with adopting the methods of questionnaire,classroom observation and speech test,for the purpose of exploring the actual situation of junior high school English teachers’ command of suprasegmental knowledge,attitude towards it and their teaching performance in practice and the impact on junior high school students’ English learning.The results show that high school English teachers’ perception and application of the Suprasegmental Features knowledge is far from being satisfactory,and there exist many problems in their attitudes and performance in teaching practice.Generally speaking,teachers’ perception and attitude of Suprasegmental Features are closely related to their teaching practice,which,in turn,has exerted a profound impact on students’ speech learning.Specifically,teachers participating in the study have generally lacked a basic understanding and systematic grasp of the supersegmental knowledge,with their teaching attitude unclear and their performance in teaching practice untargeted,leading to poor effect of classroom teaching practice.From the results of the speech test,the students’ commanding of supersegmental knowledge and their pronunciation and intonation are far from being required by the syllabus,which must be resulted from teachers’ ignorance of the Suprasegmental Features and their ineffective teaching performance in classroom instruction.Accordingly,it is of great necessity for junior high school English teachers to have a good understanding of Suprasegmental Features and instruction and reconstruct Suprasegmental knowledge and classroom teaching plan,so as to create a better phonetics teaching environment for students and stimulate their learning motivation and enthusiasm.Generally speaking,the results of this study are rather satisfactory,having achieved the expected goals.In terms of promoting the development of Suprasegmental Features teaching practice,this study is able to provide a series of beneficial suggestions and a practical basis for English teachers who intend to carry out effective phonetic instruction to improve students’ English phonetic ability.The study has also laid a practical foundation for further research in this field.At the same time,constrained by time and condition,this study still has some deficiencies in the research.For instance,when it comes to teachers’ lacking Suprasegmental Features knowledge and their attitudes towards teaching practice,the study didn’t explore the causes and it remains to be analyzed more systematically in further studies;when it comes to the number of the subjects in the survey,it is small and is not authoritative enough to represent all the English teachers.