A Study On The Assistance From Vocal Music Training To The English Phonetic Acquisition Of Chinese Middle School Students

This research introduced English phonetics, Chinese phonetics, vocal music phonetics and theexperimental phonetics. By reviewing literature on the origin of language and relationship betweenmusic and language in a large scale, the author conducted a comparative study among Chinese,English and vocal music phonetics under the theoretical framework of language transfer theory andcomparative analysis hypothesis. By means of acoustic experiment, a relatively more scientificmethod, whether vocal music training is helpful to the English phonetic acquisition of Chinesemiddle school students or not could be investigated by the scoring method under the theoreticalframework of vowel pattern theory and tone pattern theory. So far, scholars of experimentalphonetics at home and abroad have done researches on the correlation of vocal music and speechsound, which all proved to be a positive result. However, few researches are implemented in Chinaon the assistance from vocal music training to second language phonetic acquisition, and relatedresearches abroad are mostly qualitative analyses. So the research involved in this paper has itsnecessity and practical significance.With the help of a standard pronunciation recording as the testing material, pretest aimed atdividing the subjects into two groups of the approximately equal pronunciation competence. Onewas chosen as experimental group, which after accepting vocal music training for a month, wouldparticipate in a posttest together with the other group, that is, control group. The results of theexperiment were later used in a comparative study between control group and the experimentalgroup. Four main research questions are examined:1. Would the performance of both two groups in posttest be different from that in their pretest?2. Would vocal music training have any positive effect on students of experimental group?3. Would the performance of experimental group students be different from that of controlgroup students in their posttest?4. Would the result of the experiment be much affected by individual differences of the students?The experiment focuses on the four main questions above, and thirty students from ShexianCounty, Huangshan City, Anhui Province took part in it. Furthermore, scoring work of subject’srecording material and training work of vocal music was distributed to three teachers, who are quiteexperienced in English teaching in middle school, and a music teacher respectively from ShexianMiddle School. Combining the result from phonetics software Praat and the scoring result, theresearcher made both intra-group and cross-group comparisons and the experimental results wereanalyzed statistically in SPSS. It indicates that vocal music and speech sound are closely related toeach other, and vocal music training could do help to students’ pronunciation learning. But itseffectiveness varied with individual differences. Vocal music training might be relatively moreeffective on female students or senior students, or the students who have relevant hobbies to music.