Reasons For And Countermeasures To The Typical Phonetic Errors Of Students Of Higher Vocational Technical Colleges

In China, though in recent years, researches on English phonetics teaching and learning have gradually drawn people's attention, the result of phonetics learning is still relatively very weak. And the ineffectiveness of English phonetics teaching in Higher Vocational Technical Colleges seems to be more serious. Some previous researchers have pointed out some reasons:1) In Higher Vocational Technical Colleges, phonetics teaching has always been regarded by many English teachers as something that is not very important in English teaching, especially when it is compared with listening, reading comprehension and writing. Besides, the usual formula of phonetics teaching begins with the boring theories about how to pronounce consonants and vowels, and then followed by the monotonous way of presentation and some meaningless mechanical drills. As a result, this kind of boring teaching makes the students lose their interest in learning English phonetics and even lose heart to improve their English pronunciation.2) The students from these colleges also have some wrong opinions in English learning. The ultimate goal of most students is to get the certificate in some English exams. Usually, they regard to pass CET4&6 as the more important task in their English learning.3) Many students of these colleges are from the rural area, always they speak with obvious accent and little confidence, and some of them even do not have any ideas about the basic knowledge of English phonetics. For all these reasons above, they often encounter more difficulties in their phonetics study. To investigate and analyze the main reasons for the usual phonetic errors among the students and then try to find out the effective countermeasures to this problem, the author then carried out a research among 20 teachers and 274 students at Changsha Normal College. During the procedure of the research the author first adopted an interview for the 20 teachers, two questionnaires and two pronunciation tests for the students, and an experiment which lasts for one month.After detailed analysis of the collected data, the author got a conclusion that the main three reasons for the usual phonetic errors among the students at Higher Vocational Colleges are:1) The unsatisfactory present teaching situation at these colleges, including the limited or even unavailable teaching periods, the single textbook and the inappropriate assessment system of the students'English pronunciation, all of them, are the factors that have brought negative influence to students'phonetics learning.2) The influence of affective factors. The students'self-concept, motivation, attitude and learning and communication anxiety do influence the students'English phonetics learning.3) The influence of mother tongue transfer causes many typical phonetic errors at segmental level and suprasegmental level. Besides, after analyzing the data of the post-test, we believed that the students' learning result would be better if people make the following points, such as increase the teaching time of English phonetics courses, employ the proper teaching materials, pay some attention to the affective factors and adopt effective teaching methods and techniques.