An Analysis Of The Pronunciation Features Of Vowels And Consonants Read By Shenyang English Learners

Accurate English pronunciation is significant in English communication.However,many Chinese English learners pay little attention to English pronunciation when they learn English.Therefore,they have not mastered the correct pronunciations of English vowels and consonants.The purpose of the research is to analyze the features of vowels and consonants produced by Shenyang English learners and explore the pronunciation deviations by referring to the relevant data of American speakers.The research mainly answered the following three questions:(1)What are the pronunciation features of vowels produced by Shenyang English learners?(2)What are the pronunciation features of consonants produced by Shenyang English learners?(3)What are the possible reasons for the deviations in vowels and consonants produced by Shenyang English learners?The research analyzed all the 20 vowels and 24 consonants produced by Shenyang English learners.The materials selected were from AESOP—CASS(Asian English Speech Corpus Project—Chinese Academy of Social Sciences)speech corpus.The author randomly chose the pronunciations of 28 words read by 30 Shenyang English learners(including 15 males and 15 females)and 10 American speakers(including 5 males and 5 females)from the speech corpus as the research materials.Based on acoustic phonetics,the author used the phonetics software Praat to annotate all the selected materials and obtained relevant data.Then the author dealt with the data by using Excel,compared them with those of American speakers,and drew relevant figures to present the deviations of vowels and consonants produced by Shenyang English learners vividly and clearly.The research results are as follows:When Shenyang English learners produce monophthongs /i:/ and /i/,they cannot distinguish them clearly.When producing /?/,/?/ and /?:/,they tend to put their tongue in a lower and more front place.As for the pronunciation of diphthongs,compared with American speakers,they put their tongue in a higher,lower,more front or more back position at the beginning of the sound and the end of the sound.Relatively obvious pronunciation deviations exist in /i?/ and /??/.When they pronounce /i?/,they put their tongue in a lower and more front position at the beginning of the sound and still in a lower position at the end of the sound.As for the pronunciation of /??/,they tend to put their tongue higher and more back at first and end with their tongue still higher but more front.When Shenyang English learners produce consonants,relatively distinguished pronunciation deviations exist in /s/,/?/ and /?/.Some Shenyang English learners tend to pronounce /?/ and /?/ like /s/.Besides,some of them can not distinguish /f/ and /v/,/w/ and /v/.According to the current English learning situation,the author explored the reasons for the pronunciation deviations from the perspective of language transfer,teaching methods and learning strategies.Language transfer has a great effect on the pronunciation features.Based on the analysis of the reasons for the pronunciation deviations,the author provided practical suggestions to help Shenyang English learners improve their pronunciations of vowels and consonants.