英语论文网

Chapter One Introduction

Rhythm is one of the important prosodic features for people to express feelingsand exchange information. The fact that English is a stress language while Chinese atone language makes the rhythm acquisition especially difficult for Chinese Englishlearners. Thus it is of great necessity to make a thorough investigation into learners’rhythm acquisition and find out problems holding back the learning process.

1.1 Research Background
English and Chinese belong to different language families which differ greatly inpronunciation features as well as phonological structures and prosodic characteristics.In China, English learning as a second language is not only influenced by Chinese butalso by different local dialects. As our country is broad and abundant in dialects,people belonging to different areas may not communicate well for different dialects.Besides mandarin, there are ten dialectal areas: Northern dialect area, Jindialect(Shanxi), Wu dialect (Shanghai), Hui dialect area (Anhui), Gan dialect area(Jiangxi), Hunan dialect area (Xiangtan), Cantonese dialect (Guangdong), PingDialect area and Hakka dialect area. People from different dialectal areas may speakmandarin with their local accent, and their accent may influence their spoken English.As a result, to study and analyze the difficulties in learners’ English acquisition in thedialect background has become extremely necessary and important.Languages can be classified according to their rhythms. English is commonlybelieved to be more stress-timed (the duration between stressed syllables occurregularly ). On the other hand, Chinese tends to be more syllable-timed (syllablesoccur at regular intervals). The existence of such a dichotomy between stress-timedlanguages and syllable-timed languages is supported by Abercrombie(1967: 97): “Asfar as is known, every language in the world is spoken with one kind of rhythm orwith the other”. As English and Chinese are rhythmically quite different from eachother, if learners perform the rhythm inappropriately, it may not only causemisunderstandings but also even block successful communication in internationalbackground. However, in our country the attention of English teaching and learninghas long been focused on written tests mainly represented by vocabulary and grammar.Although Chinese English learners can do excellently in written tests, they can’t dowell in spoken English. Somehow what they produce are sort of Chinese-like Englishwith nearly every word pronounced loud and clear. They can perhaps pronounce everyword correctly but they can’t reach the native-like fluency for lack of rhythm. It hasbecome a great concern for researches in second language acquisition through theages.
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1.2 Purpose and Significance of This Research
This paper intends to present a comparative research of English rhythmicfeatures (including rhythm pattern, stress, pause and speech rate) between nativespeakers and Chinese Northeastern English learners through acoustic experiments.Generally speaking, this study has been motivated by the following reasons: theimportance of rhythm in communication and language acquisition, the lack of present studies in Chinese English learners’ rhythm acquisition, especially in dialectbackground, and the need to enrich the study of prosodic acquisition in Chinesedialect areas.Aimed at describing and comparing the differences in rhythmic features