A prosodic Analysis of an English phrase

Abstract

One of the popular methods of using English movie clips in English teaching is through repeating practice. To gain insights in practice using movie clips, this study first discusses a possible risk in the repeating practice by reviewing previous research regarding English teaching using movie clips along with findings in experimental studies on emotion recognition. Second, a common English phrase derived from various scenes in different movies is analyzed with a sound visualization software. The duration in milliseconds and pitch gap in hertz is measured from the pitch contour. The distribution chart on the axes of duration and pitch gap shows the diversity of the prosodic feature of the same phrase. With the marking of the emotion category that each token conveys, the study discusses how the finding should be applied in the repeating practice using movie clips.