The purpose of the workshop is to provide English teachers or learners with more empirical findings regarding the vowel movements and the pitch accents in English prosody. The vowel movement is not well described nor interpreted in any of the current textbooks used for pronunciation instruction. However, studies (Liu, 2006; 2007) show that the vowel movements in both the stressed vowels and the unstressed vowels produced by native speakers of English are very different from those produced by Mandarin-speaking EFL students. In other words, EFL students in Taiwan do not seem to be able to grasp the essence of the vowel qualities even if they have spent 6-7 years of learning English.

In addition, in a contrastive study (Liu, 2007) examining the pitch accents produced by native speakers of English and the EFL students in Taiwan, we noticed that EFL students in Taiwan tend to use "stressed" syllables more frequently than native speakers. In other words, native speaker will have difficulty understanding such expressions because "stressed syllables" means "important information." And an utterance usually has only one or two pieces of "important information." Therefore, the too-many-stressed-utterance produced by EFL students might be hard for native speaker of English to comprehend because they cannot efficiently obtain the mportant information from the utterance.

If you have any problem with the software, please contact ckliu@mail.ntpu.edu.tw