Effects Of Communicative Pronunciation Teaching On English Speech Fluency Of Chinese College Learners

Being able to communicate fluently in a second language is a core goal of second language teaching.However,due to the complex and multifaceted nature of fluency,researchers domestic and abroad attempt to unveil its underlying mechanism from different perspectives.As the extension and concretization of CLT,the CPT is a comprehensive approach to improving pronunciation skills and oral communication skills through a variety of communicative competence-oriented classroom activities.Given this,the current study aims to probe into whether the CPT method has a significant impact on Chinese college students’ speech fluency in the real classroom context.This study experimented on 56 freshmen majoring in English from two intact classes in a college.The first class was randomly selected as the experimental group by the CPT method for 8 weeks while the second class as the control group with the traditional pronunciation teaching method for the same length of the instruction.During the pretest and posttest,pictures description was operated to elicit speech production and the whole test process was accurately recorded through the speech analysis software called Praat,and the repeated measures ANOVA were carried out to analyze the data through SPSS according to the 8 fluency measures proposed by Kormos(2006).Furthermore,to explore students’ preferences for the CPT,the experimental group was assigned a semi-structured interview,and the results were analyzed qualitatively.The results are as follows:(1)The CPT method has a significant positive impact on students’ speech fluency compared with the traditional pronunciation teaching method.The statistical results showed that the experimental group revealed a relatively high degree of significant progress in SR and MLR;the PTR,NSP,and MLP also demonstrated significant improvement,but the extent was lower than the first few items;there were also some advancements in repair fluency measures,but not significant enough;no significant changes was observed in the control group among all indicators.(2)At the micro-level,the results showed that SR and MLR were the most sensitive measures in the process of fluency development,which might have some implications for pronunciation instruction;(3)The results from the semi-structured interviews with the experimental group illustrated that participants generally expressed a high level of acceptance of the CPT,and gave high ratings to phonetic training,diverse forms of classroom activities,comparison of theoretical aspects of English and Chinese phonetics,and explicit feedback.This study sheds some light on the cognitive aspects of speech fluency and foreign language teaching in the areas of English pronunciation,speaking and interpreting and also provides preliminary validation of the CPT method.