Experiments in language teaching have indicated that, especially in the case of teaching English as a foreign language, no pronunciation of English sounds natural unless the intonation (prosodic features) is fairly acceptable. Even with satisfactory consonants and vowels, a phrase with incorrect melody still sounds foreign. On the other hand, when brief phrases are given proper pitch pattern, large errors in consonants and vowels seem much less important. English is spoken with a stress-time rhythm; the everyday speech of Chinese tends to be a polysyllabic language which often combines two or more syllables. The rate of utterance of a succession of syllables, unlike that of English is syllable-timed, the length of each syllable remaining approximately the same. Therefore, in teaching Chinese speakers to learn English, the shift from their tendency toward a syllable-timing rhythm to a stress-timing rhythm is very necessary. Consquently, syllable analysis in both languages must become a basic step in the learning process. This contrastive study of American English and Mandarin Chinese examines the syllable structure and prosodic features of both languages and relates this analysis to language teaching. (AMM)