An Interlanguage Theory-based Research On Sound Swallowing In Phonological Acquisition By Freshmen In English Major

With the trend of globalization, English becomes an international language.Thus English education has received an increasing attention all over the world,especially in China. However, there still exists a large gap between English used byChinese learners and the Standard English. This gap is especially found in phonetics,for instance, Chinese English learners sometimes swallow sounds, insert sounds orpronounce consonants and vowels in a wrong way. These errors may hinder usefulinformation in conversation and furthermore obstruct smooth communication. Sincepronunciation plays such an important role in communication, it is necessary to makea further investigation among English learners to find out why they commit errors,what tendency or variability their errors appear and how to reduce errors.The subjects of this research are English freshmen choosing from School ofInternational Relations in Sichuan International Studies University. This study adoptstwo research approaches including questionnaire survey and quantitative analysis. Inthe very beginning, the author collected the subjects’ personal information like gender,age, home town, dialect, as well as their background information of Englishpronunciation knowledge through the questionnaire results. And then during theperiod from September2011to December, the author selected four different times,requiring subjects to read the Appendix2. She recorded their readings, analyzed them,and found out the error frequencies.With the help of SPSS and excel, the author discovered some sound swallowingregularities as follows: first, the subjects swallow consonants more than vowels whenthey pronounce; secondly,/w/is frequently swallowed in the initial consonantclusters; thirdly,/l/,/k/,/θ/are always swallowed in the final consonant clusters;fourthly,/p/,/b/,/t/,/d/,/k/,/g/which placed in the middle of a word arecommonly swallowed; fifthly, some single consonants are swallowed when they areplaced at the end of a syllable; finally,//and/i/are not totally but half swallowedwhen they are in the end of a word. In order to help the subjects avoid swallowing sound, the oral English teacher laidemphasis on the related phonetics knowledge. The author found that in the process oflearning English pronunciation rules especially how to avoid swallowing sound, acertain tendency which can be called systematic variation has been presented by thesubjects. It can be divided into four stages: the random error stage; theerror-correcting stage; the backsliding stage; the stabilization stage.This study has not only great theoretical importance, but also profound practicalsignificance. Theoretically, it starts a new perspective for the study of interlanguagetheory; and practically, it sheds light on how to improve English phonetics teachingand learning.