A Case Study Of Using Film Material In English Pronunciation Teaching

Nowadays pronunciation teaching has aroused more and more linguists'attention and in our country it has become the compulsory subject in the English Department of many universities. Unfortunately, most students don't have proper pronunciation until the college or university time because of the ability of teaching faculty, the lack of facilities, the misunderstanding in students' cognition and so on. The traditional pronunciation lessons focus on explaining the theory of Phonetics and the boring training of each phoneme and the students will be daunted by the large amount of new words. On the whole, Chinese college or university English majors meet lots of problems in pronunciation learning which makes them have great difficulties in the learning of many other courses, especially in listening and interpretation. After learning pronunciation for the whole semester, they haven't made much progress. The reform of pronunciation teaching is inevitable.Based on Krashen's Input Hypothesis and Swain's Output Hypothesis as well as the author's learning and teaching experiences, the author puts forward the suggestion of pronunciation teaching aided by film materials, i.e., film-aided teaching approach. Compared with traditional pronunciation teaching, film-aided teaching approach can create an excellent environment for English learning. It is a multimedia method which integrates watching, listening and speaking and can broaden the channel of knowledge dissemination by engaging multiple senses. A film presents a lively situation, rich and authentic language, varied and light-hearted format which can release students' anxious mood. According to Krashen's Affective Filter Hypothesis, the students who have high motivation and less anxiety can have a better learning efficiency. It also provides an ideal premise for English instruction and gives students a wider space for language practicing; A rich film library can provide us the information on history, society, culture, tradition, geography, nature, economy and politics of English-speaking countries, helping expand the content of teaching and knowledge, and accepting knowledge by engaging multiple senses. It has the potential of becoming the main vehicle of English language instruction but few people put forward the idea of combining pronunciation teaching with film much less the concrete experiment and plan.One of the important parts of this thesis is based on the experimental study. Two groups of 67 fresh students from one of Heilongjiang Universities were chosen as subjects of the study,33 in the experimental class and 34 in the control class. The difference lied in that the experimental class had a pronunciation teaching employing film video as the main carrier of language materials. Due to the advantages of films as the carrier of language materials, various activities for the experimental class were designed to get students involved in the language learning process. For the control class, the language learning activities listed in the textbook were conducted in the classroom. The author first explores the major pronunciation problems lie in English majors. Then she cuts down the boring theoretical explanation to enhance students' learning enthusiasms and provide a detailed teaching plan and video clips. This study is intended to seek a more effective and practical approach in improving students' English pronunciation by adopting the film-aided teaching approach. This study may help to improve English pronunciation teaching and learning and consequently improve their overall language proficiency. What's more, the research may provide experimental data for further study.In order to test the validity of the experiment, the data were collected through two questionnaires, an interview, a pre-test and a post-test of English pronunciation. After analyzing the results from the survey study and experimental study, the author reached tentative conclusions that films as the vehicle of learning materials can better motivate students in the language classroom than the traditional textbook-based language materials. Students instructed with language materials from films performed better in the posttest of English pronunciation, and more students in the experimental class improved not only their pronunciation but also speaking, listening and range of vocabulary. Moreover, most students in the experimental class held positive attitudes towards pronunciation teaching through films. All these conclusions provide theoretical and practical basis for the future study in pronunciation teaching and also cast some lights to the related researches on English teaching.