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Chapter Four Results and Discussion

4.1 Tonality Patterns of EFL Learners in Vocational College
In order to find the answers to the research question ''what are the patterns ofEFL learners' tonality", a detailed comparison was made between EFL learners’ invocational college and native speakers and two major notable differences are found.One is more pauses at intonation phrase boundaries, and the other is shorter intonationphrases. Form the table above, it can be seen that the percentage of pause and pitch resetused by the native speakers accounts for 58% and 34% respectively. In contrast, theproportion of pauses and pitch reset employed by EFL learners in vocational collegeoccupies 74% and 19% respectively.Compared with native speakers，the percentage of pause employment is higherwhile the percentage of pitch reset use is much lower, which shows that EFL learnersin vocational college tend to depend more on pause to signal a boundary while nativespeakers depend on both pause and pitch reset.

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Conclusion

The study aims to explore the intonation patterns of Chinese EFL learners withinthe framework of Halliday's 3Ts system (tonality, tonicity and tone). 10 nativespeakers and 40 vocational college students are required to read the same material forthe collection of oral production and comparison. After annotation and comparison,similarities and differences are found between intonation patterns of native speakersand Chinese EFL learners in vocational college. The major findings of this study arelisted below.With regard to tonality, Chinese EFL learners tend to employ more pauses thannative speakers. To be specific，the number and duration of pauses exceeds that ofnative speakers. The negative interference may contribute to this phenomenon. Inaddition, Chinese EFL learners are inclined to divide the speech into shorterintonation phrases and mark boundaries between intonation phrases by temporalmeans rather than pitch reset. At last，the study also observes that Chinese EFLlearners in vocational college are poor at employing the tone group to highlight theprominent information.In terms of tonicity, the percentage of unmarked tonicity of Chinese EFL learnersis lower than that of native speakers.
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