A Study On Pronunciation Problems Of Rural Junior Middle School English Teachers And Countermeasures

Pronunciation is one of the three basic elements of language,and it is also a basic factor for fostering listening,speaking,reading and writing skills.Pronunciation has influences on vocabulary,listening,reading and communication.The National Department of Education proclaims the new "English Curriculum Standard(2011)" for junior middle school,and it sets second and fifth level goals of phonetic knowledge,which includes pronunciation,intonation,rhythm,stress,liaison.Junior middle school is a critical period for learners to lay a solid foundation for English pronunciation,which plays a vital role in listening and speaking communication.In rural junior middle school,the phonetics of students mainly comes from their teachers.However,influenced by senior high school entrance examination,English teachers always do not take pronunciation teaching seriously,and they ignore their ignorance the cultivation of their pronunciation,which bring many pronunciation problems to students and teachers.Due to that,the researcher choose rural junior middle school English teachers pronunciation as the topic,and takes Banqiao No.1 junior middle school and Experimental junior middle school English teachers in Taikang county as the subjects,aiming to find out the representative pronunciation problems and strategies.The paper mainly explores the following three questions:(1)What is the current situation of the rural junior middle school English teachers pronunciation?(2)What are the problems in their pronunciation and what are the causes?(3)What countermeasures can be taken to improve their pronunciation?The researcher conducts class observation for four months,and delivers questionnaires to 18 English teachers in rural and urban areas,then holds six semi-structure interviews with three teachers from the rural group and three teachers from urban group.The researcher uses quantitative and qualitative methods to analyze the data and obtains the major findings:firstly,the education of urban English teachers is better than that of rural English teachers.Secondly,there are mainly eight kinds of pronunciation problems,and the author discusses the eight problems in detail.Thirdly,the author discusses possible reasons for the problems,and countermeasures to improve rural junior middle school English teachers' pronunciation.