Research On The English Phonetic Learning Strategies Of Non-english Major Students In Vocational Colleges

Based on the theories of language learning strategies, this paper focuses on (1) vocational college students'phonetic status, (2) commonly-adopted phonetic-learning strategies and (3) the differences of strategy-adopting among students of different phonetic levels. We perform an empirical investigation on non-English major's students from vocational colleges, and try to present the reasons to the found problems and some indications for language teaching. The thesis is divided into five parts.Part1:The background and significance. Phonetic learning is of much concern for mastering a foreign language, while few researches touch upon the phonetics teaching from the perspective of learning strategies. Thus this paper will study this issue, attempting to provide a practical instruction for phonetics teaching.Part 2:Literature review and relevant theories. This part involves five aspects:(1) the definition of language learning strategy; (2) the classification of language learning strategies; (3) domestic research on language learning strategy; (4) foreign research on language learning strategy; (5) the importance of phonetics learning; (6) research gap of phonetics learning strategy.Part 3:Research methods and data collection. By questionnaire and phonetic tests, we selected a sample of non-English major freshmen from Hubei Communicative and Technical College. After the data collection, we analyzed the statistical results from (1) student's status and view of English phonetics and their expectation for phonetics teaching; (2) awareness of phonetics; (3) a description of the statistical results on student's phonetics learning strategies; (4) a comparison of language learning strategies between good phonetics learners and poor learners; (5) Interview questions.Part 4:Discussion. The statistical results show that:most of the students of non-English major in vocational colleges are unsatisfied with their English phonetics and hope to have systematic training of phonetics; most of the students have low awareness of phonetics; the most widely adopted phonetics learning strategy is compensation strategy and the least one is memory strategy; good learners often adopt affection strategy while poor learners with compensation strategy.Part 5:Conclusion. In this part, solutions are given to the problems in phonetic language learning according to the survey findings above. Besides some enlightens of language learning are also set forth.