Training Chinese EFL Learners To Improve Their Perception And Production Of English Vowels

Adults typically have difficulty mastering certain phonemic contrasts in the target language in the process of learning a new language.It is quite often the case that nonnative speakers tend to misperceive English vowels and be unable to pronounce them in a native-like way.Since the 1990 s,phonetic training has been widely used in the field of second language acquisition and has become an important means to improve learners’ perception of second language speech.For Chinese EFL(English as a foreign language)learners,it’s quite difficult to acquire English vowels,thus we need to explore ways to improve their perception and production ability of English vowels.Under this background,this study mainly explores the effects of phonetic training on improving Chinese English learners’ vowel perception and production capability.Specifically,the following four questions are addressed:1.Does the phonetic training change the English vowel assimilation patterns of Chinese English learners?2.Is there any correlation between perceptual assimilation patterns and discriminatory performance of Chinese English learners?3.Can phonetic training improve English vowel identification and discriminability of Chinese English learners? And if so,does the improvement in listeners’ identification accuracy correlate with their discrimination accuracy?4.Is Chinese English learners’ production performance improved in any way as a result of training?This study is to examine the effectiveness of phonetic training on the perception and production of English vowels for Chinese EFLs(English as a Foreign Language).In this study,the pretest-training-posttest paradigm is adopted: the pre-test is totally identical to the post-test,including one production experiment and three perception experiments(assimilation experiment,discrimination experiment and identification experiment).The subjects need to do the production experiment at first,and then the three perception experiments in turn.Phonetic training is conducted in the form of identification test with a total of 16 sections.Subjects are required to do 4 sessions a day for 4 consecutive days.A total of 24 subjects participate in the study,and are divided into two groups: the Experimental Group(EG)and the Control Group(CG).The recordings of the stimuli in this study are collected from the Phonetic Laboratory of Jiangsu University of Science and Technology.The production stimuli are recorded by Cool Edit Pro,labeled by Praat 5352 which then extracts the required data,and finally analyzed by SPSS software.The experimental results are as follows:1.The English vowel assimilation patterns of Chinese English learners do not change significantly after training.For the EG,English diphthongs demonstrate more concentrated assimilation patterns compared with the English monophthongs,except for /??/ which are assimilated into four different Mandarin vowel.2.The perceptual assimilation patterns of Chinese English learners are significantly correlated with their discrimination performance.To some extent,assimilation patterns could predict discrimination accuracy.The results of discrimination experiment further confirm that the higher the assimilation overlap rate,the lower the learner’s discrimination accuracy would be.3.Phonetic training indeed improve learners’ both identification accuracy and discrimination accuracy.It could improve the identification accuracy of English vowels to a large extent,but the discrimination accuracy only to a small degree,moreover,the improvement in the identification accuracy has no obvious correlation with the improvement in the discrimination accuracy.4.Perception-based phonetic training cannot improve Chinese English learners’ vowel production performance.The acoustic data demonstrates that the duration of English vowels has not changed except for the vowel /ɑ/,/?/,/e?/.Moreover,no evident change is found in the acoustic diagram for the 15 English vowels produced by EG from the pretest to posttest.The study finds that phonetic training has different effects on the perception and production of English vowels by Chinese English learners.First,phonetic training has different effects on different perception tasks.Listeners’ identification performance could be advanced to a large degree while only small improvement is found in their discrimination performance after training,that is,training could help to enhance listeners’ ability to identify specific English vowels while it could not help to strengthen listeners’ perceptual ability to distinguish phonetic contrasts.Second,it is difficult for Chinese English learners to acquire English tense/lax vowels.The low discrimination accuracy of English tense-lax vowel contrast suggests that Chinese English learners do not really grasp the distinctive features of the English tense/lax vowels,thus less improvement of tense-lax contrasts are found at posttest.Third,no significant difference is found in Chinese EFL learners’ production performance after training,as demonstrated by duration and spectral data.This indicates that phonetic training did not make much difference to learners’ production of English vowels.Major findings of the present study reflect Chinese EFL learners’ perception of English vowels and the acoustic features of their production.Additionally,it enriches the application of speech learning models.What’s more,this study provides powerful data support for improving Chinese EFL learners’ acquisition of English vowels,especially of tense/lax vowels,which will not only have great significance in improving learners’ oral expression capability,but also contribute a lot to classroom English teaching.