An Acoustic Study Of Mongolian Students’ Acquisition Of English Consonants

There are many researches on English pronunciation,including vowel pronunciation of Chinese college students,consonant pronunciation of Chinese college students,vowel and consonant pronunciation of some minority ethnic group students,and even the influence of dialects in some regions on English pronunciation.However,there are few researches on English consonants based on Mongolian students,especially Mongolian English learners who take English as a third language.What problems exist in their English consonant pronunciation and whether their pronunciation is more influenced by Mongolian or Chinese are worth discussing.Therefore,from the perspective of experimental phonetics,this paper analyzes the errors in Mongolian students’ acquisition of English consonants and tries to answer the following two research questions:1.What are the characteristics of Mongolian students’ English consonant pronunciation?2.Which language has more influence on Mongolian students’ consonant pronunciation,Chinese or Mongolian?In order to explore the above research questions,the researchers selected three male and three female Mongolian students from Northwest Minzu University as the subjects and listened to their English recording samples for the purpose of finding out their phonetic errors.Then the researcher used the Acoustic analysis to study what language influences the Mongolian students’ English consonant pronunciation.The results are as follows: 1.The most obvious errors in Mongolian students’ English consonant pronunciation include [r],[?],[z],[v],[l] and “th” combination.The pronunciation is not accurate enough.2.Through contrastive analysis of the consonant pronunciation patterns of Mongolian students in English,Chinese and Mongolian with Praat software,it is found that the English pronunciation [f],[m],[r] are more influenced by their Chinese pronunciation,[w],[l],[t],[g],[d?] are more influenced by their Mongolian pronunciation,while the remaining English consonant [s],[h],[n],[b],[d],[p],[k] are difficult to confirm by which language they are more influenced in pronunciation.Based on the research results,the researcher summarizes the causes of Mongolian students’ errors in English consonant pronunciation,which are: errors caused by the characteristics of the subjects;errors caused by phonetic teaching;errors caused by learning attitude and errors caused by the differences among English,Chinese and Mongolian.According to the causes of errors,this paper puts forward three suggestions for phonetic teaching,including using “flipped classroom” teaching method;using assessment for learning in phonetics teaching process and establishing phonetic classroom.