A Case Study Of The Pronunciations Of English Word-Final Fricatives By Chinese College Learners

This dissertation studies the pronunciation characteristics of word-final fricatives of the college students through an experiment on word-final fricatives, and then explains the experiment results using Markedness Theory and Language Transfer Theory. Finally, some suggestions will be given to teachers and students to make right pronunciation of fricatives.First of all, a comparison between the consonant systems and the syllable structures of English and Chinese is made, and the similarities and differences between them lie a theoretical base for the experimental results.Secondly, in order to study the characteristics of word-final fricatives, the author designs an experiment. The author collects the corpus of word-final fricatives of18college students. There are1260words and sentences of word-final fricatives. Then the mistakes of pronunciation are collected by hearing judging and PRAAT. According to Markedness Theory and Language Transfer Theory, there are three types of mistakes, including replacing consonants, deleting consonants and inserting vowels. Furthermore, replacing consonants occurs the highest rate.The most difficult fricative is dental, then alveolar, palatal and labio-dental. The rate of pronunciation mistakes will ascend with the raise of the markedness. The rate of markedness relates to the degree.of similarities to mother tongue, and it also relates to the ways of consonants articulation. The results also relates to the sequence of learning English fricatives. The rate of correct fricative pronunciation in a single word is higher than in the sentences.Finally, the author gives several suggestions to teachers and second language learners to avoid pronunciation mistakes of fricatives.