An Analysis On The Teaching Of English Pronunciation For Non-English-major Undegraduates And Its Strategies

For many years, we have already reached a consensus that pronunciation is very important in language acquisition. As people's understanding of language's communicative competence develops and communicative approach becomes more and more popular, more attention has been given to the importance of pronunciation teaching. However, since factors affecting pronunciation learning are diversified and complicated, pronunciation teaching has always been a weak section in language teaching. How to enhance students'communicative competence in pronunciation class has become a hot research topic for language teachers and educators.This paper focuses on the pronunciation problems of non-English major undergraduates (NEMUs). Based on communicative teaching theory and the author's teaching experience, a new teaching mode for pronunciation teaching is proposed, that is student-centered teaching mode.This paper falls into five parts. Chapter one introduces the importance of pronunciation teaching and misunderstandings of current pronunciation teaching.Chapter two gives a historical review of the pronunciation teaching for L2 learners and points out that the ultimate goal of pronunciation teaching is to develop the communicative competence of language learners.Chapter three makes an analysis of a survey among students and an interview among teachers, and elaborates factors affecting students'pronunciation learning. It is found that the issue of current English pronunciation teaching is not whether we should teach it or not, but how to teach it more effectively so as to improve students' communicative competence. It suggests the necessity of an elective course of English pronunciation for NEMUs.Chapter four proposes student-centered teaching approach. To prove that the new method is better than the traditional one, the author conducts an experiment. By comparing the scores and performance of students in experimental class with those of the non-experimental class in an oral test, the author tentatively arrives at a conclusion that the student-centered pronunciation teaching is better than the traditional one and is an effective way to improve students'communicative competence.Chapter five is the conclusion of the thesis. It states that there are limitations in student-centered teaching mode. Therefore, the author believes that the new approach might need more improvement.