0.1 The Background of the Study
The area of pronunciation teaching can be regarded as“ Cinderella" area of foreign language teaching(Kelly, 1969), whichleaves teachers unsure of how to provide adequate instruction and whatstrategies to be adopted in English pronunciation teaching courses.Conventionally, pronunciation teaching has emphasized mastery ofindividual sounds. Teachers usually focused on the articulation ofconsonants and vowels and the discrimination of minimal pairs. But withthe development of Communicative Language Teaching, fluency ratherthan accuracy have gained more and more attention, and thus an emphasison suprasegmental phonemes such as stress, rhythm and intonation isbeing advocated in phonetics teaching, which aroused a segmental andsuprasegmental debate. But no matter how target-like their stress, rhythm,and intonation might be, it is obvious that learners whose speech soundsdeviates too broadly from standard English will find themselves difficultto be understood. Thus, it is no longer a question of choosing betweensegmental and suprasegmentals, but of identifying which featurescontribute most to lack of intelligibility, and which will be most useful inthe communicative situations in which our learners will need to function.
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0.2 The Goal of the Study
In teaching pronunciation, the goal is three fold: to enable studentsto understand and be understood, to build their confidence incommunication and to enable them to monitor their speech based on inputfrom the environment (Morley, 1994). To accomplish these goals, weneed to teach pronunciation in a systematic and principled way, which isthe purpose the present paper attempts to achieve. Based on the generalqualities that make for high survival value among memes and the featurein the four stages of successful meme propagation, the present authorthinks that the process of the acquisition of English pronunciation andintonation can be that of the meme replication; therefore the teaching ofEnglish pronunciation and intonation is a process to help students in theprocess of assimilation, retention, expression and transmission. Thisthesis attempts to study whether imitation, repetition and recitationstrategies are effective for students to learn English pronunciation andintonation well. It will center on the following three questions.
1) Can the training and using of learning strategies of imitation,repetition and recitation effectively help students improve their Englishpronunciation?
2) How to arouse students' interest in imitation, repetition andrecitation in their learning?
3) What are the implications of the research on Englishpronunciation and intonation teaching?
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Chapter One literature review
1.1 Research on Memetics
The field of pronunciation and intonation teaching has undergonemany fluctuations and shifts over the years; however, there is no end to itsexploration. With the emergence of "meme" theory, many languageresearchers have taken into consideration of studying language from theperspective of memetics. This chapter gives a literature review to therelated research topic. At present, quite a few of scholars are engaging in the research onmemetics at multi-levels and in multi-perspectiv，英语毕业论文，英语毕业论文
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