Phonetic courses are not commonly provided for Japanese majors in Chinese universities. Pronunciation practice mainly concerning individual phonemes usually takes 2- 4 weeks at the beginning of Japanese learning. The prosody training involving pitch, mora, pause and intonation is absent due to limited courses. However, prosody is regarded as one of the important factors marking naturalness and fluency of Japanese pronunciation and intonation. The present study, based on an experiment conducted in off-class time and focusing on“shadowing”practice for three months, proves that students after the practice make less mistakes in mora, tone, intonation at the end of a sentence or text, and overall intonation by combining subjective teacher's listening assessment and objective phonetic analysis software. It is thus concluded that“shadowing”practice has exerted a strong influence on the phonetics and intonation improvement of the students and provides new possibility for students to improve their prosody performance in their self-study.
YIN Song.
Effects of Shadowing on Improving Prosody in Japanese Learning through Teacher's Listening Assessment and Phonetic Analysis Software[J]. Foreign Language Learning Theory and Practice. 2015, 1(4): 70