A Survey Of Pronunciation Learning Strategies Of Higher Vocational English Majors

In the reform of educational structure in china recently, vocational education is being focused and higher vocational education is developing rapidly. With the increase of student enrollment in higher vocational technical college (HVTC), the proficiency in English language is declining. It was found that HVTC English majors generally encounter many difficulties and generate lots of transfer errors in English pronunciation.Based on the Oxford's classification of language learning strategies, this paper focuses on commonly-adopted pronunciation-learning strategies by the college English majors and the differences and similarities of strategy-adopting among students of different pronunciation levels. We perform an empirical investigation on English major's students from vocational colleges, and try to present the reasons to the found problems and some indications for language teaching by employing the valid questionnaire investigation, interview and classroom observation.The questionnaire was designed according to Oxford's (1990) Strategy Inventory for Language Learning (SILL) and Wen Qiufang's (1996) questionnaire. The designed questionnaire was administered to 137 first grade students from the English majors in Traditional Chinese Veterinary Medicine College, and Ocean College of Hebei Agriculture University. The quantitative data were analyzed with the aid of Statistical Package for Social Science (SPSS 13.0). The result of the analysis combined with the interview and classroom observation reveal the major findings as follow:1) Most of the students of English major in vocational colleges are unsatisfied with their English pronunciation and hope to have more pronunciation training.The college students are able to use the cognitive strategies, compensation strategies, metacognitive strategies, affective strategies and social strategies with the medium use frequency, in which metacognitive strategies are used the most. They neglect the effect of memory strategies to a certain extent, whose application frequency is low.2) The good learners and weak learners both use learning strategies in pronunciation learning, but the good learners employ the learning strategies more effectively and frequently with medium level of application frequency; while the weak learners use the learner strategies with low frequency except for the compensation and cognitive strategies.Finally, causes of the problems in pronunciation language learning were summarized. Based on the major findings and the causes above, some implications for fostering the abilities of learning strategies application are provided.