A Study On The Application Of Prosody In Teaching English Conversation In Middle Schools

With the increasing degree of internationalization of our society,oral English ability,especially communicative ability,has been paid more and more attention.According to the language skills requirements of the English Curriculum Standards for Compulsory Education(2011 edition),middle school English teachers should cultivate students’ correct pronunciation,intonation and reading ability,cultivate students’ ability of situational conversation according to the topic,and develop students’ ability to communicate with others and cooperate to complete tasks.Besides,in the appendix part of middle school English textbook published by Lu Education,it introduces some prosody knowledge and requires students to master.In addition,middle school English prosody teaching faces many challenges.Man-machine dialogue has become the general trend of the listening and speaking test.Through the speech model analysis technology,the man-machine dialogue system realizes the evaluation of the quality of the sound segment and the rhythm of the prosody.Situational conversations can provide students with a more natural,daily and real context.In the real context,students’ prosody expression will be more abundant and natural.In addition,every unit in Grade One English textbook,published by Shandong Education Press,contains a situational conversation section.The topics of these conversations revolve around students’ daily life and study,which is conducive to students’ understanding and expression.Therefore,the research relied on English conversation to teach prosody.At present,domestic research on prosody,especially on the teaching methods of pronunciation,intonation and stress in students’ language output,is still insufficient.Based on the multimodal discourse theory,input and output hypothesis theory,and using Praat speech analysis software,this study used the textbooks for Grade One of junior high schools published by Shandong Education Press to study the following three questions:1.What are the current prosodic features of students in English conversation in middle school?2.What feasible prosody teaching methods could be applied in English conversation teaching? In what ways could the methods be applied?3.What is the effect of these prosody teaching methods?The study lasted for three months.The subjects were 48 students in a class of Grade One in a middle school in Zibo.The research tools are pretest,post-test,questionnaire and interview.Before the experiment,48 students were pretested in English conversation,and teachers were pretested in a questionnaire about prosody.Through the pre-test,master the prosodic features of Grade one students.During the experiment,the research not only adopted the traditional prosody teaching method,but also added new prosody teaching methods to fully realize the maximum effect of prosody teaching.First of all,prosody knowledge is systematically taught so that students can first understand what the prosody is.Second,Praat is used to analyze the recording and present the figures to give students a visual and intuitive feeling.Third,let the students listen and feel the prosodic change by listening.Then,let the students mark prosody of the conversation text in the textbook by teaching the symbolic marking method of stress and intonation.Lastly,the students are instructed to use body language to express prosody in conversation practice.After the experiment,48 students were given a post-test of English conversation and interviewed about the effect of prosody teaching.Finally,the author used Excel to analyze and discuss the collected data.The findings of this study are as follows:(1)In terms of the pre-test and the teacher’s questionnaire,the students in Grade One had no awareness of prosody and cannot correctly grasp the sentence stress and intonation.(2)The results of English conversation post-test and interview show that students’ awareness,knowledge and skills of English prosody have been improved,which proves the effect of the study and the prosodic teaching methods are feasible.Consciously,students accepted the Praat voice software very much,and thought that the language figures are intuitive and reliable.In terms of knowledge,students have a clear cognition of prosody knowledge.In terms of ability,students can use symbolic notation to mark prosodic changes in the input stage,and use non-verbal language to assist prosodic expression in the output stage.All in all,students’ interest in learning the prosody greatly increased and students enhanced their confidences in English conversation and learning.