Acoustic Research Of English Vowel Acquisition Of Lhasa Tibetan Undergraduates

English, a language belonging to the west Germanic language, Germanic branch, Indo-european family of languages, varies in different areas. Among the English variations, General British is one of the most popular one with 13 vowels. Tibetan, a language belonging to Tibetan language, Myanmar language branch, Sino-tibetan family of language, has a great many of variations. And Lhasa dialect which has 14 vowels is one of them. Though vowels of General British and those of Lhasa dialect are nearly the same in quantity, they differ greatly in quality.With the aim to study the GB vowel acquisition of Lhasa Tibetan undergraduates of primary English level, this thesis picks out 12 Lhasa Tibetan undergraduates (6 male and 6 female) whose English is below level 4 as participants of our study through questionnaire. The content of the study mainly includes two parts. One is the foreign English teachers’ assessment of the participants’ GB vowel pronunciation; the other one is the acoustic analysis of the pronunciation. Foreign English teachers’ assessment tells the order of the acquisition difficulty. The acoustic analysis aims to find out the biased errors of pronunciation as well as the mother tongue transfer during the GB vowel acquisition.The result of the study shows:1. The acquisition of /(?):/,/(?)/(word-initial),/i:/,/u:/ and/α:/is of high accuracy; the acquisition of /(?)/,/e/,/(?)/,/ε:/and/a/(word-final) is secondary; the acquisition of/(?):/,/I/,/(?)/and/a/is the worst; 2. Less attention has been paid to the comparison of neighbor vowels during Lhasa Tibetan undergraduates’GB vowel acquisition for the tongue position of the Tibetan-English interlanguage vowels is not in accordance with that of GB vowels; 3. Positive mother tongue transfer as well as negative transfer exists during Lhasa Tibetan undergraduates’GB vowel acquisition; 4.The acquisition order of GB vowels in terms of Lhasa Tibetan undergraduates of primary English level is as follows:phonemes of high similarity --different phonemes--phonemes of low similarity, which backs up neither the Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis nor the new language transfer theory.Based on the result of the study, this thesis proposes three suggestions for Lhasa Tibetan undergraduates’ GB vowel acquisiton and their teachers’GB vowel teaching: 1. both teaching and learning should be carried out systematically; 2. Vowels should be visualized during teaching and learning; 3. Comparison of mother language and targe language is necessary during teaching and learning.This thesis only studies the primary stage of Lhasa Tibetan undergraduates’ aquisiton of GB vowels, which can not fully reveal the dynamic changes of the Tibetan-English interlanguage. To reveal the whole dynamic changing process of the Tibetan-English interlanguage, Lhasa Tibetan undergraduates of Intermediate English level and advanced English level should be included in the study.