An Investigation To The Problems In Speech Perception And Production Among The Students In Wu Chuan No.1 Middle School

Canadian linguist James E. Flege mentioned that foreign accents in English are common in the speech of non-native speakers. Foreign accent, to a large extend, originates from L2 learners’insufficient acquisition of L2 speech, which brings phonetic features of mother tongue in L2 speech. In the Cantonese dialect regions in China, Cantonese students encounter a lot of problems in English acquisition, which lead to their inaccuracy of the English speech. And the foreign accent is just the most obvious reflection of the speech inaccuracy. In order to solve these speech problems, and further to improve students’accuracy of English speech in Cantonese dialect regions, the origins of their speech problems should be figured out at the very beginning.Reviewing the previous researches on Cantonese learners’problems in English speech, the theory of Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis is mostly applied to make comparison between English and Cantonese speech, and the problems in speech production are discussed in detail. Whereas, another factor bonded with speech production closely is neglected, that is speech perception, which is the key to speech production. According to the western speech perception theories, the successful second language speech acquisition relies on learners’speech perceptual ability. That is to say, the accuracy of speech production lies on the learners’ ability of discrimination and identification to the second language speech. Therefore, this study is firstly to investigate into the origins of Cantonese students’ problems in speech from the perspectives of both speech perception and speech production, and then to provide appropriate perceptual training, thus to overcome the students’ Cantonese accents and improve their accuracy of English speech.Based on the western speech perception theories, this study makes an investigation, of which the subjects are 52 senior high school students in Grade One from Wu Chuan No.1 middle school in Guang Dong province. By applying the research methods of questionnaire, speech test and free talk, the research questions are as follows:(1) What are the students’ problems in speech perception and production?(2) Is there any correlation between the students’ accuracy of English speech and their speech perceptual ability?(3) Are there any teaching strategies to help the students to solve the problems in speech perception and production, thus to overcome the students’Cantonese accents and improve their accuracy of English speech?By thorough investigation and analysis, the final research findings are listed below:(1) Students’problems in production can be divided as substitution, deletion and addition. Students’ misperception of speech sounds, especially their misperception to those similar sounds between English and Cantonese, brings out incorrect pronunciation, which is a correspondence to Flege’s theory that the difficulties for second language learners lie in those similar sounds between two languages. However, this study also fiinds that not all the incorrect pronunciations come from the misperception of similar sounds. Cantonese speaking habit, and distinct divergence between two languages are also responsible for the mispronunciation in English speech.(2) Students’ accuracy of English speech is influenced by their speech perceptual ability to some extent. Besides, without proper training, the speech production is also incorrect though the speech sounds are perceived correctly.(3) Students’ speech perceptual ability can be enhanced through discrimination and identification training, while speech production can be enhanced through awareness-raising exercises, thus to overcome their Cantonese accents and improve English speech accuracy.This study is an investigation into students’ English speech learning problems in Cantonese dialect regions from the perspectives of speech perception and speech production. For one thing, this study enriches the study of speech perception in China; For another, this study emphasizes high attention should be focused on students’ perceptual ability, and some teaching strategies are serviceable to English speech teaching in Cantonese dialect regions as well.