English picture book reading is one of the popular methods developed in recent years to cultivate children’s reading ability based on the picture books. English picture book reading can build English reading passages from the classroom to the outside for the children. What’s more, it can provide children with a complete learning experience when learning English. The original English picture books can let children soak themselves in the western culture to feel the language’s original enchantment. At the same time, it can provide a good chance for the children to learn real and rich vocabulary, to assist in the development of children's language ability. In addition, perse themes of English picture books can serve as a grate method to extend children's life experience and to stimulate children's interest in English reading. Moreover, high quality English picture books can stimulate children's emotion, and even conservation of children's lives. What have mentioned above is about the general functions and characteristics of English picture book reading.
Picture Book, refers to a story book with both texts and pictures, expressing specific emotions and themes. It can be regarded as an art of telling story by painting and writing interaction. In common parlance, the Picture Book is actually a picture story book. In this article, the English Picture Book refers to the picture story book which use English as the language with certain rhythm. The reading activity by using the Rhythmic Picture Book as a carrier to lead the children to read is called “Rhythmic Picture Reading”. “It is a reading activity that fuses visual art and language art into one". (Yu Lidan, 2012)
According to Celce-Murcia “…. there is a threshold level of pronunciation for nonnative speakers of English; if they fall behind this threshold level, they will have oral communication problems no matter how excellent and extensive their control of English grammar and vocabulary might be” (Celce, et. al. 2010).
The requirement for pronunciation in primary school can be traced back in The New English Curriculum Standard (2011)
Taken children on Grade Five in primary school as an example, it is clear explained in the New English Curriculum Standard about the speaking requirement that students should be able to:
1. Provide information, express simple views and opinions and take part in different discussions about simple topics.
2. Exchange information and cooperate with others to complete tasks
3. Correct oneself appropriately during speech
4. Inquire for information and ask for help effectively
5. Carry out situational dialogues according to different topics
6. Perform short plays in English
7. Use natural pronunciation and intonation and an appropriate tone during the above activities
All those requirements are based on a good acquisition of pronunciation. And the study is focused on the elements of pronunciation so as to help students in primary school in development of their pronunciation.
However, many problems lie in the current pronunciation teaching in the primary school. For example, the Chinese pupils learning and teacher teaching concentrate more on single words pronunciation rather than focus on the whole sentence. And the study aims to investigate the impacts of singing picture book model on the development of pronunciation by making experiments on some pupils and analyzing the suprasegmental features of pronunciation in terms of intonation, stress, pause based on the picture book. Thus some necessary and useful data and conclusions can be applied into teaching pronunciation in the future. By digging into the study of elements of pronunciation and the possible reasons undersurface, some suggestions which could be applied to the frontier of English teaching will be put forward. 通过学唱英语绘本提高学生英语语音水平的研究(3):http://www.751com.cn/yingyu/lunwen_45468.html