English Pronunciation Learning: Senior School Students' Beliefs And Strategies

Pronunciation teaching is a neglected field in TEFL and research focused on study of English pronunciation on the part of English learners in China from a micro angle proves insufficient. The few micro researches into pronunciation teaching and learning at home mainly involve English majors and learners in junior high schools in contrast with those less frequently implemented catering to senior high school students.The current empirical study grew out of the insufficiency of studies on pronunciation teaching on a micro level and was based on the theoretical foundation related to pronunciation learning motivation, goals, self-concept and strategies. In the present study 108 students of Grade One in a local senior high school were sampled as the subjects and took part in the survey aiming to investigate the status quo of their pronunciation learning belief and strategies.The research provides us with the findings that:the pronunciation learning belief of the subjects in the current study needs improving. Despite their high motivation, their negative attitude and low self-concept hamper the cultivation of their proper conception of pronunciation learning; with regard to pronunciation leaning strategies, the statistical figures suggest that most of the items included in the questionnaire are familiar to them, while their using of these strategies need to be diversified and systematized. Compensatory strategy turns out to be a most frequently used category in the inventory, followed by cognitive and affective strategy. The least frequently used is memory strategy and the use of metacognitive and social strategy stays on an intermediate level. On the whole, the English pronunciation proficiency the subjects' is at a lower intermediate level with polarized gaps. Taking an overall view of the statistics, we discover significant positive correlation exits between pronunciation achievements learning motivation and attitudes. Pronunciation learning self-concept is reported to have a weak positive correlation with the subjects' pronunciation scores. In addition, three subcategories in the inventory of pronunciation learning strategies bear significant positive correlation with learners' pronunciation performance in the survey, i.e. memory strategy, cognitive strategy and metacognitive strategy. This positive correlation is less significant in the case of social strategy. Lastly, an insignificant positive correlation and a significant negative correlation are found in the cases of affective strategy and compensatory strategy respectively.The present paper, in an attempt to analyze the subjects' pronunciation learning belief, strategy, effect with the correlation between each variable and pronunciation proficiency level, presents a full picture of the state of the art of senior high school students' English pronunciation learning. Efforts are also made to root out the crucial factors in successful and ineffectual pronunciation study as well as the corresponding countermeasures. It is hoped that subsequent micro research can be enlightened and facilitated with the aid of the research in question.