A Study Of Formants Patterns Of English Vowels Produced By Chinese EFL Learners

This study compares F1and F2of the vowels produced by Mandarin students withdifferent proficiency levels as well as the data of Chinese learners of English andnative speakers. The significance of this study is that it explores the characteristics andoverall patterns of English vowel production by Chinese learners of English,illuminating the process of English vowel learning. Meanwhile, it examinesContrastive Analysis Hypothesis (CAH) and the third hypothesis of Speech LearningModel (SLM). It also addresses, to some extent, the gap of the research on formants ofEnglish vowels produced by Chinese EFL learners. This study differs from previousresearches for the following three points. Firstly, the subjects of previous studies wereChinese ESL learners, while the subjects of this research are Chinese EFL learners.Secondly, previous studies focused on the front vowels, with back vowels barelyinvestigated. The typical back vowel/u/is involved in this research. Thirdly, none ofthe previous researches have examined the influence of the same age and differentproficiency levels upon English vowel learning, which is explored in this research.Specifically, this thesis addresses the following three questions:1. What are the general patterns of F1，F2of the English vowels produced byChinese learners of English?2. What is reflected in the learners acoustic features of the English vowels acrossproficiency levels?3. Whether the accuracy of producing the English vowels is influenced by similarMandarin vowels?The subjects of this experiment are60Mandarin students within the age rangefrom12to18years old. The stimulus materials are beat, bit, bait, bet, bat, boot, bead,bid, bade, bed, bad and book. F1and F2were obtained out of2160tokens.The major findings are:1) The vowel space chart of Chinese EFL learners is almost triangular, with/i/, and/u/in the three corners. The vowel space chart of this research is similar to thegeneral tendency proposed by Ladefoged (2006) and Reetz&Jongman (2009).2) The proficiency level impacts the production of the vowel in terms of its vowelformants. Significant differences are found concerning the F1and F2of almost all thevowels between the two proficiency level groups in each grade. The students with highEnglish proficiency level produce English vowels more accurately compared with those with low proficiency level.3) When the English vowels have similar sounds in Mandarin, the vowels areeasier for students to master, while the vowels without similar sounds in Mandarin areharder for them to learn. The results are in agreement with the predictions made in theContrastive Analysis Hypothesis.The results of this empirical study are in support of the Contrastive AnalysisHypothesis. The findings can serve as a reference for teachers who try to designeffective teaching and training techniques for a target group. Meanwhile, it cancontribute to the effectiveness of teaching and learning English vowels.