The Application Of Communicative Teaching Method In English Pronunciation Teaching

Pronunciation plays an important role in the process of communication, which is the ultimate goal of English learning. While teaching, the author found that many students could pronounce the phonemes in isolation correctly, but it is hard for them to transfer this accuracy into the continuous speech. For example, students could pronounce the sound /θ/ perfectly in the pronunciation learning, but when they speak"Thank you very much"in real language environment, many students pronounce it as"Sank you very much". To solve this problem, the author hypothesized that communicative teaching method is helpful in improving their pronunciation.To test the reliability and efficiency of this hypothesis, the author has done an empirical research in two classes for ten weeks. One is the experiment class; the other is the control class. Both of the two classes are taught with the same material and by the same English teacher. The communicative teaching method is adopted in the experiment class, while the traditional teaching method in the control class. To ensure that both of the two classes have no significant differences before training, a pronunciation test was conducted at the very beginning. A post-test was given after ten weeks'training to see whether the communicative method is effective in improving their pronunciation in continuous speech.The two tests are recorded in a notebook computer with the help of the software Pro Cool Edit 2.0, and then graded by an American teacher. The data and the statistics were obtained and analyzed by SPSS 17.0 (Statistical Packages for Social Science) and Excel 2003. Praat was also employed to examine the isolated sounds. The result shows that the students in the experiment class have a higher pronunciation achievement in reading aloud and speaking spontaneously than the students in the control class. Compared with the traditional method, the communicative teaching method is helpful not only in improving students'pronunciation and their communicative ability, but also in arousing students'interest in pronunciation learning. Therefore, it is feasible to apply this method to English pronunciation teaching.The originality of this thesis lies in that, in addition to the statistical analysis of students'results by SPSS 17.0 and Excel 2003, experimental phonetics and the phonetics analysis software Praat are employed to analyze and compare their pronunciation efficiency, which could display students'pronunciation more objectively.As the experimental research is done to the participants from vocational school, and the number of students in each class is small, such questions as whether this method could be applied to larger classes and whether this method is appropriate under the present system of college entrance examination are not discussed in this study. Researchers and teachers interested in communicative teaching method could explore these questions in depth.