الفهرس 
Theoretical Background and Previous StudiesOnly 14 pages are availabe for public view
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Abstract
Chinese learners of Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) as a foreign language show many pronunciation complexities that may convey non-intended meaning, cause distraction or annoyance. One of these complexities is the production of prosody of Arabic which is a non-tone language by Mandarin Chinese (MC) learners whose first language is a tonal. The components of Arabic prosody are stress, intonation and Rhythm. Speech rhythm is defined as durational variability that can be captured by the interval-based rhythm metrics, but rhythm is difficult to define precisely (Turk et al., 2013). The attempts to find isochrony in any of the timing dimensions of speech rhythm as a linguistic structure, or to support the claim that languages are divided into rhythmic classes based on periodicity are unsuccessful (Roach, 1982; Pammies, 1999; Dauer, 1983). Thus, this study addressed stress and intonation. The current study investigates MSA stress and intonation as a foreign language acquired by MC learners and describing the challenges and differences of MSA acquisition as a foreign language by Chinese learners. Findings of such studies will help in developing teaching materials to address Arabic prosody errors that influence the intelligibility of learners’ speech. The participants of the present study are twenty Chinese students from the southwestern part of China who studied MSA for two years at a university in China and studied MSA for eight months at the university of Alexandria. The participants’ proficiency levels are intermediate and advanced. The speech sample of Arabic word stress at word level is composed of thirty words. These words have different syllabic structure in type and number as well as they have different stress position matching all MSA stress rules collected through reading technique. Additionally, the speech sample of word stress at sentence level and intonation is composed of five declarative statements, five statements with negative imperative particle collected through
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answer-seeking questions, five Wh-questions and five polar questions elicited using flash cards. The results of stress show that Participants have an adequate Knowledge of the syllabic structure of MSA. Also, the results showed that almost all participants had the ability to place MSA stress to the accurate position. In intonation, the results showed that intonation performance of Chinese participants were closely resemble the production of native speakers. Finally, it was found that proficiency level has no significant effect on the results of this study.