The Intonation of How are you for Taiwanese EFL Learners

Raung-Fu Chung ； Shu-Ping Chuang

《應用英語期刊》 11期 (2017/06) Pp. 1-35

摘要

While English intonation is highly subject to pragmatic settings, most Taiwanese English learners fail to get such knowledge, so they show diversified performances in their recognition, perception, and production. The main target for this study is the greeting sentence: How are you? In most English textbooks, it is classified into the pattern of rising-falling intonation. Accordingly, the researchers expect that English learners in Taiwan would follow this pattern. Recruited in this study were 52 subjects, all of them asked to take the cognition and perception tests, while only 27 of them participated in recording the greeting. The finding indicated that subjects had no clear idea of what intonation pattern should come with the greeting. Most subjects recognized and perceived that rising or rising-falling intonation was the best for the greeting, but they preferred to use rising-falling and falling-rising in production. Save for native language interference for the falling-rising intonation, what was revealed was that EFL (English as a foreign language) learners found it difficult to learn (acquire) English prosody eventually.

關鍵字

English intonation ； EFL ； Acoustic studies ； Pragmatics