A Study On Language Factors Affecting Speech Production In College English Learning

College English teaching and learning was once labeled as "less effective but more time-consuming", because college graduates can hardly handle tasks which require them to use English freely, such as communicating with the superiors and colleagues at their workplaces, attending meetings, meeting customers, etc. To remove the "curse" of what has been dubbed "mute English" and prepare our graduates to meet the diverse needs of the global society, much has been done about the college English teaching reform, with teaching principle, teaching model, teacher’s role, and types of assessment included. Most of the reform focus on how to create a good external learning environment for English learners, however, the learning subjects-college English learners are not so much looked into. Given that external causes become operative through internal causes, teachers and scholars need to get clear and close look at the learning subjects-college English learners and find out the underlying factors. This is exactly what the thesis tries to answer:1. What are the factors affecting speech production in College English learning?2. What degree do the factors affect speech production in College English learning?"Using a model as a starting point makes clear what problems we are addressing, what problems we are ignoring, and forces us to make explicit some of our central assumption" (Meara,1989:12). So Levelt’s speech production model is used as a factor finder to start the first what-question.Basically, Levelt’s speech production model is a parallel information processor with activation spreading in the mental lexicon. It treats the speech production problem in the order of its intuitively natural progression (conceptualizationâ†'messageâ†'sentence formâ†'articulationâ†'monitoring and control). Thus it consists of a number of autonomous components which are responsible for different aspects of speech production. These components include:Conceptualizer, Formulator and Articulator. These are integrated in a larger language usage system-the Speech Comprehension System. Accordingly four basic factors affecting speech production are identified:content factor, language factor, pronunciation factor, and communication factor.Having known the factors, the thesis goes to the second how-question by experimenting the four factors in Spoken English Contest and questionnaire.There are eighty college English learners from School of Literature, School of Political Science and Law, School of Life Science, and School of Chemistry at Central China Normal University getting involved in the study. They had one-and-a-half-year language preparation through oral English course and got the Spoken English Test and the questionnaire at the end of the third semester. The results from both experiments show that the four factors are descendingly ranked in the order:Content>Language> pronunciation>communication. This importance order of factors is identical to the stages of speech production:conceptualizing—grammatical encoding—phonetic encoding—communicating. Accordingly, some pedagogical implications are given. It is suggested that the college English teaching should be communicative, context-based and content-based, and a powerful training component should be by all means included in the classroom, for explicit teaching of phonetics and communication skills and abundant practice would facilitate the learners’ automated speech production.