The Study Of Chinese Learners’ English Accent Features: A Mixture Of GB And GA

English has been widely used all over the world nowadays. People throughoutthe world use English as their mother tongue, official language or at least secondlanguage. Thanks to the rapid development of science and technology and thespread of information, people from different countries form their own way ofspeaking English based on their cultural background and living habits. That is why wehave American English, Canadian English, Singaporean English or even ChineseEnglish. Among all these English varieties, only British English and American Englishare boasting of their national features not only in pronunciation but also invocabulary and grammar, etc. Others fail to form systematic characteristic nowadays.Therefore, American English and British English have become two major varieties ofEnglish.As English learning is becoming increasingly popular, there are more Englishlearners becoming interested in English pronunciation learning. However, it is a pitythat due to the lack of formal and systematic instruction and training, many peopleseem to be confused about the differences between British accent and AmericanEnglish accent. They just learn by themselves or do some imitation, which may leadto the blending of British and American English accents, thus causing their Englishaccents a little bit weird and awkward.As a result, more and more researchers are making contrastive study on thedifferences between them. This thesis will mainly focus on the differences ofpronunciation between British English and American English. Their differences will beillustrated in three aspects, including sound differences, word stress and intonation.The sound differences include the vowels and consonants, which make up thesegmental differences; word stress and intonation make up the suprasegmentaldifferences between the two accents.Later on, a research about the blending of British and American Englishaccents among non-English majors is carried on to present the commonphenomenon of mixed use of the two accents and the major problems among college students. The study is conducted by comparing the students’sound-recordings with the pronunciation of native subject(s), based on InternationalPhonetic Alphabetic (IPA) and with the help of Praat, a phonetics software. Aftercollecting all the80sound recordings from the subjects, we can clearly find that thephenomenon of mixture of British and American English is quite common andserious among non-English majors. On the one hand, vowels, consonants and wordstress are seriously mixed pronounced; on the other hand, students even have littlesense and knowledge about English intonation. Most of them read all these wordsand sentences according to their habitual use.On the basis of the results of the research, inspiration gained from theprevious study and analysis is discussed. The inspiration mainly concern about threeaspects: inspiration for English teachers training, for college students practicing andfor textbook designing.To sum up, although it is not a must to pronounce English as “standard” asthe native speakers, it is really necessary to learn toward one direction until yougrasp the “pure” British or American accent. Mixture of the two accents should beavoided among English learners. Another point is that there is no superioritybetween British and American English accents. They share equal status. Our ultimategoal is to speak with correct and comparatively pure accent.