| The investigations of developmental patterns in L2 provided evidence of an order of acquisition for morphemes and evidence of developmental sequences in the acquisition of specific syntactic structures. Based on the morpheme studies, Krashen postulated a'natural order'of acquisition which claims that the rules of language are acquired in a predictable order, some rules tending to come early and others late. Motivated by the findings in the field of grammar and following the methodologies used in the morpheme studies, this thesis makes an experimental effort in exploring the developmental patterns in phonetics and phonology, primarily, the acquisition order of the English phonemes by the Chinese L2 learners. Through longitudinal studies made on a Chinese pupil and cross-sectional studies on college English majors, it has been noted that the Chinese L2 learners follow a similar order in their acquisition of the English phonemes. Vowels in either the closest or the most open positions are generally acquired before those in the intermediate positions; most short vowels present the most difficulty; diphthongs also come at a later stage; plosives are generally acquired earlier, followed by the nasals, approximants; the voiced fricatives are among the last to be acquired. This order correlates a lot with that of how the native speakers acquired the English phonemes. The major difficulties which disturb the order come from the sound system of the learners'L1; geographical factors seem to influence a lot in the acquisition process. Based on the analysis of the phoneme acquisition order and the difficulties, the thesis has proposed several schemes on the presentation order in teaching the English phonemes to the Chinese students. Other issues concerning the order of presenting segmentals and suprasegmentals and of using the two standard models, RP or GA, in pronunciation teaching have also been proposed for further discussions.
|
PDF Full Text Request