The Role Of Chinese In Learning The English Phonemes/v/,/θ/,/e/and/з/by Primary School Students

Compared with the other three skills in Englishlearning, pronunciation has not been considered at the samelevel as listening, reading and writing by the majority ofChinese students. Dating back to the mother tongueinterference, this study examines how Chinese beginninglearners of English acquire the four specific Englishphonemes/v/,/θ/,/e/and/З/and how Chinese influencestheir perception.With the aim of finding the typical pronunciationproblems in beginning learners of English, this study usesphoneme discrimination tests as well as a questionnaire to theteachers. The role of the phoneme discrimination tests is todetermine whether the English beginning learners couldcapably perceive the four tested phonemes and whether theirproduction consists with the perception. The teacherquestionnaire in the study aims to determine how the ChineseEnglish learners acquire the four tested phonemes from theperspective of teachers, and how the teachers investigatedinstruct the students to learn the four phonemes.With the reference to theories of the Speech LearningModel, Markedness Differential Hypothesis and PerceptualAssimilation Model, I analyze and discuss the features ofproblems in this thesis. The results demonstrate that Chinesestudents are likely to have perception difficulty in acquiringthe four phonemes at the beginning stage of English learning.Chinese interferes with the perception of the non-native phonemes as well as similar phonemes in the second languagelearning process. Moreover, this study reveals thatparticipants could correctly recite the words with the testedphonemes even when they fail to have an accurate perceptionof the tested phonemes. This phenomenon may provide uswith the evidence that Chinese students are likely to achieve arelatively higher score in reading and writing but are still poorin pronunciation.Taking a careful consideration of these influentialfactors in second language pronunciation among thebeginning learners in the fifth grade of the primary school, Ialso explore some pedagogical implications for teachers andstudents, together with material designers so as to facilitatethe classroom-based second language pronunciation teachingin China.