1.2 Significance and purpose of the research
With the development of information age and the global economy, English has become increasingly important and can be used all around the world. In today’s global community, the study of foreign language is a necessity. College students want to have proficient oral skills to communicate with foreigners if they want to study abroad or work at an international company. It is demand students can pronounce words exactly .(Dou,2010)Therefore, this study is a further research to invesitagete the influence of musical intelligence on English pronunciation .This study has some significance: First, it explores that college student who has different level of musical intelligence has different level of English pronunciation. It shows the influences of musical intelligence on teaching English pronunciation among non-English-major Chinese EFL learners. Second, it investigates the strategies that these learners have used to acquire the ability to English pronunciation and some musical training is suggested to aid pronunciation. From the results, we can give teachers of English in China teach English pronunciation with music and use some effective way to improve the musical intelligence of students. Additionally, I believe the results will help language instructors to improve their approach to pronunciation teaching so that they can better help less successful learners learn pronunciation As far as I know, there are very few studies have been done in order to investigate the influence of musical intelligence on English pronunciation. So it will contribute to enriching the literature on teaching and learning pronunciation.
Purpose of this research is to prove that students with high-level musical intelligence can pronounce words better than students with low-level musical intelligence. And this study is done to answer those following two questions:
Research Question1: Is there a significant difference in musical intelligence among different gender?
Research Question2: Does college student who has high level of musical intelligence has high ability of English pronunciation?
1.3 Organization of the research
The research consists of five chapters.
Chapter one offers a general introduction of the research, including the background, significance and purposes as well as organization.
Chapter two presents theoretical analysis of English pronunciation, music, and musical intelligence.
Chapter three shows the methodology of the research, including participants, instrument, date analysis and procedure.
Chapter four indicate result of each test. And the author discussed the result of each test.
Chapter five summaries this whole paper, lists out the findings and presents the limitation and further expectation.
2. Literature review
2.1 English Pronunciation
2.1.1 Significance of Pronunciation
Historically , Pronunciation received its prominent position in the last 20th and focused primarily on teaching suprasegementals, because without prosody, speech would not only be flat and uninteresting but would lack large components of meaning (Chevallier, Noveck, Happe, and Wilson 2009; McKay and Hornberger 1996; Morley 1994, Wennerstrom 2001a).There is quiet rightly maintained by Dou ,he proposed that only when you learn how to pronounce correctly and fluently can you understand others and express your points( Dou,2010). And he also said that if you learn how to pronounce correctly and fluently then you can promote the reading and writing ability and improve the English expression and comprehensive quality . Pronunciation is perhaps the linguistic feature most open to judgment. As a surface structure phenomenon that is most noticeable, one’s accent easily evokes people’s biases. Pronunciation has been the most prescriptively taught aspect of language instruction(Canagarajah 2005)had said that in the learning of English as a foreign language ,discussions on pronunciation are not so much around how to teach pronunciation is important for speaking. Therefore,pronunciation is the foundation of language teaching in order to cultivate the ability of express words exactly.