Assessing The Effects Of Revised High Variability Phonetic Training On L2 English Sound Perception And Production

It has always been a heated topic of phonetic experimental studies to explore various types of phonetic training for improving the pronunciation of second language(L2)learners,and HVPT(High Variability Phonetic Training)has been verified by a large number of experiments to be effective in improving the perception and production of L2 learners.Based on the basic principles of HVPT,the present study revises HVPT by adding the explanation of the articulation process and mechanism and visual feedback which are perception oriented,i.e.,HVPT-r(Revised HVPT),and aims to explore its effectiveness for Chinese L2 learners on perception and production.Six consonants(/p/-/b/,/t/-/d/,/k/-/g/)and six vowels(/?/-/e/,/i/-/i/,/u/-/u/)which have been reported to be difficult for Chinese English learners were selected as target sounds.Sixty English majors of a university in Henan were selected as participants,and they were randomly divided into an experimental group(EG)and a control group(CG)with each 30 participants and took part in the same pre-test and post-test,but only the EG received HVPT-r training.The results of tests are used as experimental data.Meanwhile,4 native English speakers completed a subset of the perception tasks to give normative data and also completed rating tasks for participants’ English production.The recording is carried out in the professional speech laboratory with the software Praat and the data were analyzed with the help of software SPSS and Excel.The present study concludes that HVPT-r has significantly improved the performance of Chinese learners’ perception and production.For perception,after receiving HVPT-r,the perceptual accuracy of six consonants has been significantly improved.Among them,the improvement of consonants/t/-/d/was the most significant in perceptual accuracy.The training effect of vowels was not as good as consonants.Four vowels(/?/-/e/and/u/-u/)had a significant improvement in their perception accuracy after receiving HVPT-r.Although the accuracy of vowels/i/-/i/had been improved,there was no significant difference between EG and CG.For production,the production of consonants/p/,/t/,/k/,and/g/were all significantly improved and close to the production of NS.Whereas,the improvements of the consonants/b/and/d/were not significant.Vowels/?/,/e/,/i/and/u/were significantly improved.However,for tongue frontness,the vowel/i/was still too front,and for tongue height,the vowel/u/was too high.In the production test of comprehensibility,HVPT-r had significantly positive effect in improving the comprehensibility of production of Chinese English learners.This thesis not only confirms the effectiveness of HVPT-r but also provides a reference for the practical application of experimental phonetics training.Meanwhile,it provides some pedagogical enlightenments for Chinese English speech learning and teaching.