| Fossilization is a universal phenomenon in the process of second language acquisition which restricts largely the development of L2 learners’ inter-language.Research on fossilization phenomena which is the core issue of inter-language has been of great interest to SLA scholars.Since the notion was put forward by Selinker(1972),researchers have conducted many studies on the definition,classification and causes of fossilization.Inter-language fossilization has been analyzed by a large number of scholars from different perspectives and has been discussed at lexical and syntactic levels.Though there are some studies on phonological fossilization,they have still centered on theories due to the difficulties of data collection and transcription.Empirical studies on phonological fossilization are deficient.However,among all the linguistic items,the first distinct causes which hinder the learner’s acquirement of the target language are fossilized pronunciation items.Students’ pronunciation will be kept from further developing by these fossilized items.Thus,it is necessary to prevent or activate phonological fossilization in oral English teaching.Hence,based on the inter-language fossilization theory proposed by Larry Selinker,this study adopts both qualitative and quantitative methods and applies a pseudo-longitudinal approach to explore the fossilized pronunciation errors and major causes of fossilized pronunciation errors among Chinese English learners,choosing English majors from Gansu province as subjects.Furthermore,the present study makes an attempt to examine the effectiveness of Praat on destabilizing learners’ fossilized pronunciation errors by conducting an empirical study.Only monophthongs were tested due to the complexity of Praat and their vital role in communication.Therefore,three research questions are raised as follows:(1)Do the obvious fossilized monophthong errors exist among the English majors from Gansu province? What are those English monophthongs liable to be fossilized?(2)What might be the major causes that lead to Chinese English learners’ fossilized pronunciation errors?(3)Will Praat be effective in rehabilitating fossilized pronunciation errors of Chinese English majors?Hence,84 English majors from Gansu province were selected as subjects.The Clear Speak Adult Pronunciation Test was first conducted and the whole process was recorded by Cool Edit Pro 2.0 for collecting the data to analyze their fossilized monophthong errors.In addition,a questionnaire was carried out to all subjects to explore causes of fossilized monophthong errors.Lastly,19 subjects were selected to participate in the pronunciation correction training and verify the effectiveness of Praat on destabilization by conducting a treatment.The empirical data was composed by analyzing the results of the pseudo-longitudinal study and questionnaire study constitute the empirical data of the research.The data obtainedfrom the research are statistically analyzed by using SPSS16.0.The major findings are shown as follows: 1)the obvious fossilized monophthong errors do exist among the English majors from Gansu province./?/ sound and /?/ are the easily fossilized vowels sound regardless of subjects’ grades.This suggests that fossilized monophthong errors are much independent of English proficiency and influenced deeply by learners’ mother tongue.2)Besides language transfer,input is the second strongest influencing factor on English majors’ fossilized monophthong errors.Following it are the affective factor,environment,strategy,motivation,feedback on students’ pronunciation fossilization.Meanwhile,it was found that urban students performed better than rural students in the CAP test.Though,it is hard to draw a safe conclusion that there exist significant differences between students from rural area and urban area in the pronunciation situation due to the huge number differences in the rural and urban groups,.Further studies should be conducted to obtain reliable results.3)Praat is proved to be effective in destabilizing subjects’ fossilized monophthong errors.As the present study has shown,Pratt can help students not only to identify the errors,but also to perceive the origin of their pronunciation errors with images.Hence,students can correct their points of articulation.Results of the present study bring about several implications for the pronunciation teaching and learning.Primarily,as one of most important part of English learning,the negative transfer of mother tongue on English pronunciation learning should be assigned a higher priority by teachers.The teacher should find ways to help students to avoid the negative transfer of mother tongue.Besides that,teachers should master the knowledge of English phonology and phonetics and thus,they are expected to have awesome English pronunciation as well.Thereby,the correct pronunciation instructions and optimal input can be given to students.Meanwhile,teachers should provide students with corrective feedback while students are making pronunciation errors.In addition,teachers are expected to keep their eyes upon students’ emotional condition in class in order to improve the way of teaching in line with students’ individual differences and to create a favorable learning environment to arouse students’ interest in learning the English pronunciation.For instance,students can be offered with optimal input from computer softwares or Internet,such as BBC,VOA and TED.Additionally,teachers can apply modern technology in English teaching,especially pronunciation teaching.Some acoustic softwares can be applied in pronunciations teaching,such as Praat used in the present study.It has proved to be powerful not only in the analysis,the annotation,the processing,and the combination,but also in the generation of spectrogram and the visualization of subjects’ articulation,helping students to identify the source of the errors.Hence,it can make pronunciation correction more scientific and effective. |
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