| English pronunciation learning is of great importance for the first year teacher-oriented English majors, because most of them are going to serve as teachers. The present has fatal research significance because of the characteristics of local normal universities. With the development of education program, learning strategies have become one of the significant issues in the teaching research. However, researchers about pronunciation learning strategies only account for a small portion of studies on learning strategies and most research subjects are from non-English majors or English majors. What’s more, research methods are rather simple. The study aims to survey what strategies the teacher-oriented students in local normal university actually employ in the pronunciation learning process and investigate the teacher-oriented students’ problems existing in the use of pronunciation learning strategies by various research methods under the background of reform of pronunciation teaching and evaluation in the local normal university. Therefore, the author addresses the following research questions from different perspectives: 1. What are the characteristics of English pronunciation learning strategies use by teacher-oriented English majors?(1) What is the current situation of six categories of strategies use by teacher-oriented English majors?(2) What is the current situation of 12 sub-strategies used by teacher-oriented English majors?(3) What is the current situation of individual tactics used by teacher-oriented English majors? 2. What are the differences of English pronunciation learning strategies use between good pronunciation learners and poor pronunciation learners?(1) What are the differences in the use of six categories of strategies between high achievers and low achievers?(2) What are the differences in the use of 12 sub-strategies between high achievers and low achievers?(3) What are the differences in the use of individual tactics between high achievers and low achievers?To conduct the study, instruments such as questionnaire, pronunciation final test and interview are involved in the study and 124 freshmen participate in the study. The questionnaire is designed based on the framework of Peterson. The descriptive analysis and independent-sample T-test of SPSS16.0 are used to analyze the statistics from the questionnaire. In addition, the record of interview is transformed into words which will provide evidence for quantitative data.The results of these analyses are shown as follows:(1)Teacher-oriented English majors employ few metacognitive strategies, which is unbeneficial to their pronunciation learning. Affective strategies are used at a high level, which can be interpreted as they always use these strategies, while they utilize memory strategies, cognitive strategies, compensation strategies, metacognitve strategies, and social strategies at a medium level.(2)When it comes to 12 pronunciation learning sub-strategies, students prefer to use humor to lower anxiety, evaluate their own study and ask for help.(3)Compared with other individual pronunciation learning strategies, Teacher-oriented English majors prefer to believe that can have a good pronunciation through hard work, feel calm when facing pronunciation mistakes, use phonetic symbols to remember how to pronounce something, and prepare for an oral presentation by writing difficult-to-pronounce words very large in their notes. They are relatively unwilling to remember pronunciation with the help of gestures, remember articulation of words by classification, teach or tutor pronunciation for someone else and go over pronunciation regularly.(4)Compared with poor pronunciation learners, good pronunciation learners use pronunciation learning strategies in a higher frequency and greater variety.(5)Good pronunciation learners prefer to use the strategies of Practicing naturalistically, formally practicing with sounds, planning for a language task, using humor to lower anxiety, asking for help, and cooperating with peers, while poor pronunciation learners do not.(6)Significant differences do exist in the use of pronunciation learning strategies concerned with supersegmental features between good and poor pronunciation learners. Good pronunciation learners tend to pay more attention to the learning of English intonation. In general, teacher-oriented English majors in local normal universities fail to have a good command of intonation.Finally, the present research concludes and analyzes the reasons why the problems arise, and propose recommendations for students’ pronunciation learning and teachers’ pronunciation teaching. For example, teacher-oriented students should make full use of metacognitive strategies and make proper plans for their pronunciation learning. Teachers ought to enhance the training of pronunciation learning strategy use in class and make students realize the importance of using learning strategies... |
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