An Investigation And Analysis On Pronunciation Problems Of The Students In Senior High Schools

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 is taught in middle schools, primary schools and even in kindergartens in some areas. Englishpronunciation teaching is considered to be the first most important in English teaching. Good pronunciationis one of the fundamental elements for good English, and also a necessary bridge for successful andeffective communication. However, many high school students after several years of English study speakEnglish with non-native accent, thus resulting into the failure of smooth and successful communication.The author finds that quite a few of high school students lack the necessary phonetic knowledge,which leads to the non-standard pronunciation, non-native spoken English and poor hearing, let alone thecomprehension of functions of grammar, style, semantics and rhetorics that speech is engaged in, thusinfluencing the improvement of English to a certain extent. Therefore, how to help high school studentsachieve the good pronunciation though phonetic teaching is an urgent problem that needs to be solved. Theobjectives of the research are:(1) To find out the major problems with the English pronunciation of seniorhigh school students.(2) To find the ways that can account for the pronunciation problems committed bythe students. The research is conducted by random sampling, test, questionnaires, recordings andobservations. These problems are well accounted for under the theoretical frame of Contrastive Analysisand Language Transfer, which might offer help for the improvement of the English pronunciation teachingin senior high schools.The research subjects are from No.2senior high school in Xinxiang. Based on the investigationand analysis, the author finds that the examinees have pronunciation problems with vowels, consonantclusters, word pronunciation, intonation, sentence stress, juncture, rhythm and so on. All the problems lie inthe negative transfer of Chinese pronunciation. Meanwhile, with the instruments of questionnaire andclassroom observation, the results of the research are explained further to ensure the effectiveness of theresearch. The questionnaire and observation are carried out respectively in students and teachers,attempting to access the reasons for these pronunciation problems. The results show that the pronunciation of high school students is affected by the negativetransfer of mother-tongue to a large extent. English teachers still tend to use the traditional teachingtechniques, and students lack the interest of learning English pronunciation. Through the analysis of theseproblems, the author draws forth corresponding suggestions respectively from teachers and students withan aim to better the pronunciation teaching and learning. Finally the author states its implications for thefuture research.