Abstract

The traditional focus of English phonetic teaching in China has consistently been on the segmental acquisition, which is mainly highlighting the pronunciation of vowels and consonants, while its suprasegmental knowledge in speech naturalness, coherence and understanding is relatively insufficient. In addition, Chinese students have a serious problem in the rhythm of English language, which is mainly influenced by the characteristics of the syllable-timed in their mother tongue rather than in a stress-timed way. This study reviews the academic works of the nearly 15 years in the development of Chinese prosodic features of English language, giving a better and deeper analysis and appreciation of the suprasegmental phoneme levels of different aspects, such as the fundamental components of English prosody such as stress, rhythm and intonation. This study is hoped to shed light on the prosodic analysis of Chinese English learners’ oral proficiency in pronunciation, finding out the insufficiency in prosody of China English, and more importantly to provide effective learning strategy for Chinese English learners and teachers in prosody acquisition, therefore, it might pave the way to the reform of oral English teaching in China.

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