A Study On English Majors' Pronunciation Learning: Problems, Affecting Factors And Strategies

English pronunciation learning is often regarded as a complex problem. Although there are lots of problems that restrict its improvement, many scholars still recognize the importance of a decent pronunciation. However, for the reason of only occupying a small proportion in examinations, pronunciation does not get the satisfactory results. Contrarily, many teachers in colleges believe that pronunciation teaching is something not important; therefore they ignore it. As a result, the English majors'pronunciation is far from satisfaction with Standard English pronunciation.Considering the actual status of pronunciation learning in China, the present study implemented a three-week's experiment with 56 sophomores from two classes in a college as subjects. During the experiment, one class served as Experimental Group taught by the new-designed pronunciation teaching method while the other as Control Group by traditional method. Through a comparison of pre-and post-test, this experiment aims to check whether the new-designed teaching method can make noticeable difference between the two groups'pronunciation level. Besides, the present study carried out a questionnaire, which is devoted to investigate how the elements of affective factors influence the subjects'pronunciation learning. The purpose of this research is to find out English majors'pronunciation problems, factors affecting pronunciation learning and effective and practical learning strategies.Several findings were dug out in the present research. Firstly, pronunciation problems are found in both segmental and suprasegmental level and the suprasegmental problems are more complex. Besides, among all kinds of factors, Mother Tongue Transfer and Affective Filter are the most two important factors influencing learners'pronunciation learning. In them, the negative transfer influence is stronger than positive transfer and self-concept plays the most important role among all the aspects of affective factors. What is more, two effective and practical strategies are found; one is to inspire the function of learners'affective factors by learner-centered teaching method and the other is to cultivate the awareness of learners'avoiding the mother tongue interference. In addition, some other suggestions are put forward in the thesis, such as guaranteeing necessary instruction time, using proper teaching materials and building up new assessment system.