A Study On The Pronunciaiton Teaching And Learning Of English Majors In Universities Of Urumqi In Xinjiang

With the deeper understanding about the communicative competence of language,the English pronunciation, as an indispensable component of the language, hasattracted more and more people’s attention. After the observation, the author finds thatmany English learners could not use the appropriate pronunciation of words, rhythmand intonation to communicate with others. Based on this phenomenon, this studyaims to investigate the general situation of pronunciation teaching and learning andfind out the main problems in subjects’ pronunciation learning and pronunciationteaching by the means of questionnaire, pronunciation pre-test and post-test, andinterview, and it chooses170freshmen of English major and6teachers from XinjiangNormal University, Xinjiang Medical University and Xinjiang University as thesubjects.The present paper, based on Interlanguage Theory and Language Transfer Theory,Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis and Error Analysis, discusses the pronunciationproblems of subjects. The findings obtained from the present paper reveal thesituation of pronunciation teaching and learning: most subjects have not receivedsystematic instruction and training of pronunciation, especially the supra-segmentalfeatures; one of the three universities does not offer separate phonetics course forstudents and in other two universities which have phonetic course, the teachingemphasis is the segmental features. Students have realized the importance ofpronunciation，but they rely much on teachers’ instruction and are lack of ability tolearn pronunciation by themselves; Meanwhile, the teaching time is limited forteachers to instruct the supra-segmental features. In addition, textbook used inuniversities are different, and without the matched CD and MP3; the multimediateaching facility is not available at each university; and also there is no unifiedpronunciation testing criteria and system among universities to give teaching activitythe feedback.The analysis of pronunciation pre-test and post-test shows that the supra-segmental problems occur more frequently than segmental ones, and they arerelatively concentrated and universal; while the types of segmental problems havemore varieties and less concentration; after one-semester pronunciation instruction,the improvement of subjects’ pronunciation at segmental level is more significant thanthat at supra-segmental level. After comparing scores of pretest and posttest, theresults show that the students’ English pronunciation of three universities all getsimproved, but the improvement made by subjects in Xinjiang Normal University andXinjiang Medical University, which offer separate phonetics course to their student, ismore significant than that in Xinjiang University, which is without phonetics course.Therefore, offering separate phonetics course could improve students’ Englishpronunciation more significantly than integrating phonetics teaching with othercourse.Therefore, the author strongly suggests that the English majors should be offeredphonetics course and teachers should attach the same importance to the segmental andsupra-segmental features, since the course is very necessary and beneficial forstudents.