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hat means the rise and fall of pitch in order to convey a range of meanings, emotions or situations. Intonation refers to the total pattern of pitch changes, i.e., the rising and falling of the voice when a person is speaking, within an utterance.English has a number of intonation patterns which add conventionalized meanings to the utterance: question, statement, surprise, disbelief, sarcasm, teasing. Different tone of the speech is not only used to express different attitudes, feelings, but to vary degrees which affect the sentence itself ambiguous, for example: give a yes , sure, doubt, a different tone, on a completely different meaning.Youre going. (Statement) Youre going? (Question)An important feature of English intonation is the use of an intonational accent to mark the focus of a sentence. Normally this focus accent goes on the last major word of the sentence, but it can come earlier in order to emphasize one of the earlier words or to contrast it with something else. As English can be spoken correctly and naturally with the five intonation patterns: falling, rising, rising-falling tone, falling-rising and the level, it is the English intonation that makes English sound real English. The native English speakers are very sensitive to tone. For them, the most important thing is not what you say but how you say that counts. Many Chinese students are not too sensitive to the tone, or they do not know where and when the raising tone is adopted, and the falling tone too. Therefore, when they read out an English passage, they may read every sentence in the fixed falling tone from the beginning to the end, which sounds particularly unnatural.Intonation can be used to convey our feelings and attitudes. For instance, the same sentence can be said in different ways, which might be labeled happy, grateful, angry, bored, and so on. Usually, intonation units with high heads sound more lively, interesting than those with low heads. In speech, people often use intonation to focus on different purpose.For example:(1) A：Jean，can you bring me the newspaper？ B：Sorry？（& ） (2) A：Jean，can you bring me the newspaper？ B：Sorry．（ ( ） If Jean says “Sorry” in the rising tone，she means that “I didnt hear you．Could you say that again，please？” In dialogue (2)，Jean says“Sorry” in the falling tone，and she means that she refuses to help.A few generalizations are often made here: the falling intonation is said to be more often associated with completeness and definiteness, and people often use the falling tone to indicate new information and rising tone (including falling-rising) to indicate shared of given information; the rising intonation is more often associated with incompleteness and uncertainty or questioning; The falling-rising is said to have feelings of hesitation, contrast, reservation or doubt.In informal speech, for example, we may hear:（1） Theyre coming to(morrow, (arent they? （2） &nbs p; Theyre coming to(morrow, &arent they?Here, The intonation used in question-tags can either have a rising tone or a falling tone: When it has a falling tone, as in (1), the speaker is comparatively certain that the information is correct, and simply asking for conformation, while the rising tone in (2) is said to indicate a lesser degree of certainty, so the speaker is asking for information.4.Common errorsOwing to negative transfer causing by the differences between the Mandarin sound system and English sound system, it is inevitable that the Chinese EFL lea