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Chapter1 Introduction

The thesis explores the similarities and differences of the prosodic features ofEnglish imperatives between the EFL(English as a Foreign Language) learners andthe Americans in an experimental way, identifies the possible reasons for thedifferences and provides suggestions for English teaching. In chapter1, the researchbackground will first be stated, the purpose and significance of the study will then beintroduced and the structure of the thesis will finally be displayed.

1.1 The Research Background
English, as one of the most commonly used languages in the world, has neverlost its appeal as a significant communication tool. Chinese government has beenstepping up efforts to promote the English study of Chinese EFL learners due to thefact that China has been increasingly connected with the world, economically orculturally. China has already made English the main foreign language in educationearly in 1982(Lam, 2002). To speak English fluently and rhythmically can to a largeextent lessen the communication obstacles. Nonetheless, English teachers in Chinahas been focusing on teaching Chinese students segmental parts in terms of Englishphonetics, namely the pronunciation of vowels and consonants, rather than thesuprasegmental parts in English, namely stress, rhythm, intonation and so on. EvenEnglish majors in Chinese colleges are still taught to pay attention to thepronunciation of words rather than the prosody of the whole sentence. As a result, aconsiderable number of Chinese EFL learners are weak in terms of the prosody ofEnglish. Therefore, it is not surprising that quite a lot of Chinese EFL learners arestereotypically considered to have “foreign accent” more or less by the foreignerswhile only a few people can meet the level of speaking like a native speaker(Zhang,2013).
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1.2 The Purpose and Significance of the Thesis
Prosody is of great significance in any language. People can tell the speaker’scurrent mood, thoughts, attitude or even the place he comes from via his prosody, likewhether he is ironic, sarcastic, whether he wants to emphasize something, or whetherhe speaks with his own accent. Anderson-Hsieh et al(1992) find that the key to theevaluation of the testers’ pronunciation is their prosody by the professional scorers ofEnglish. Moreover, Munro(1995) holds that the native speakers, though unskilled, areable to identify the “foreign accent” of an L2 learner through his or her prosody orsuprasegmental information (Bao, 2014). Prosody is concerned with the indispensablepart of language, including intonation, stress, tone and rhythm. Prosody is reflectedthrough prosodic features such as pitch, length and loudness. Nonetheless, theprevious studies on prosody either focus on one aspect of prosody, such as intonation or stress, or research on one language rather than combine the native language withthe foreign language. Therefore, it is of necessity for this study to cover the maincomponents of prosody through the comparison of the phonetic production by foreignlanguage learners with native speakers.Imperative sentences are one of the four English sentence types, occupyingbeyond all doubt a crucial role both in English expression and daily communication.Previous studies on English imperatives mainly focus on the syntactic, semantic orpragmatic aspect while rare attention has been paid on the phonetic aspect ofimperative sentences.Given th