Chinese Pronunciation Strategies Of American Students

Pronunciation has always been regarded as the foundation of learning a language. Traditional studies on Chinese pronunciation are mainly in respect of contrastive analysis, interlanguage and error analysis. Due to the influence of cognitive psychology, learning strategy has become one of the hot topics in the study of second language acquisition since the middle of the last century. However, the domestic related research, which is of small quantity, started late, and mainly focused in English teaching and learning.This study takes37American students who participate in the IES Beijing program as an example. In order to know their Chinese pronunciation strategies and existing level of Chinese, the methods of doing survey and pronunciation assessment are used in this study. After completing data collection, questionnaires are analyzed through the statistical software SPSS and Excel. The specific data analysis methods include descriptive analysis, independent-samples T test, ANOVA and correlation analysis.The results of this study show that the overall frequency of the strategies used by the subjects belongs to the medium frequency range. Some individual factors of language learners, such as gender, other second language learning experience do not have significant impact on the use of learning strategies, but different learning duration will make big differences in choosing learning strategies. Through the comparison of students who gained high score and low score in Chinese pronunciation assessment and the correlation analysis of learning strategies, we found that there is significant correlation between metacognitive strategy and pronunciation results, and so on.According to the research conclusion, some suggestions can be put forward for teachers who will teach American students Chinese pronunciation. For example, this study can help teachers understand what strategies the students use at their present stage in the process of Chinese learning, guide the students to use metacognitive strategy more usually, etc. Hope to provide some advices for the Chinese pronunciation teaching and strategies training from the perspective of the subject of learning.