An Investigation And Reflection On The English Pronunciation Habits Of The Senior High School Students

With the development of the unity of the global economy, English, as an international language, is playing a more and more important role nowadays. English teaching has ever been valued in our country. English teaching in our country officially began with Jingshi Tongwen Guan that was set up by Qing Dynasty in 1862.The first major established in Tongwen Guan was the course of English. It was regulated by the government of Qing Dynasty in 1903 that English is a required course and one optional course must be taken from among Russian, French, German and Japanese. Foreign literature courses were also established in colleges. And probably, English teaching in our country originated from Acoustics in English Literature. Today, English is taught in middle schools, primary schools and even in kindergartens in some regions. English pronunciation teaching is considered to be the first most important in English teaching. During the process of English teaching, phoneticians and English teachers have made a study of ways to teach English pronunciation and so a lot of contributions have been made. However, students' English pronunciation will always see a sharp rebound because they haven't developed a good English pronunciation habit or they haven't had a good knowledge of English pronunciation.English pronunciation habits refer to the ones developed by English native speakers while they speak Standard English (GB and GA). In order to improve English pronunciation teaching in high schools, explore strategies for getting rid of bad English pronunciation habits and help students form good English pronunciation habits, the author has launched an investigation into English pronunciation habits of senior high school students by means of random sampling, answering questionnaires and observation. In the light of the investigation, the author has found out that the examinees have problems with vowels, consonant clusters, word pronunciation, unstressed forms, intonations, sentence stresses, juncture, rhythem, sense-groups, breath-groups and even breath habits. All the problems lie in the negative transfer of Chinese pronunciation. Through a thorough study of phonetic theories, habit theories and language transfer theories, the author has found a common concept that exists in the three kinds of theories. The author has proposed an original viewpoint of putting right the bad English pronunciation habits of the students. By contrasting English pronunciation with Chinese pronunciation, the author has found the root causes why the students' English pronunciation is influenced by their Chinese pronunciation, and accordingly put forward the following four strategies for correcting the students' bad English pronunciation habits, that is, imitating special English and listening to English natives speak Chinese in order to fully understand English pronunciation; imitating normal speed English for a change of breath habits; training mouth shapes exaggeratedly; emphasizing the study of Chinese phonetics. Then after a three-month preliminary experiment, the students' English pronunciation has been improved a lot evidently. The experiment results have shown that the strategies for correcting bad English pronunciation habits do work, and the bad English pronunciation habits will be put right.