Research On Difficulties Of American Students In Learning Chinese Vowels

In the second language learning process,learning pronunciation well can not only help students to build self-confidence in the learning process,but also help to train students' ability of second language listening and distinguishing,pronunciation and language sense.With the rising of China's international status in recent years,Chinese is more and more popular in many countries.There are a lot of overseas students learning Chinese in Nanjing University now,and many of them are from the United States,there has been increasing attention to the issue of Chinese pronunciation studying in second language acquisition.In this paper,I combine Comparative Analysis comparing Chinese and English phonetic system,Second Language Acquisition theory including Error Analysis,and Experimental Phonetics together to folly investigate American students,vowel learning situation.Combined with the current research situation,the needs of the application of Chinese teaching,and experimental phonetics methods,I investigate the Chinese vowel learning situation of 12 students in experimental group and 28 students in verify group.This paper focus on 4 phonology,namely u[u],u[y],e[(?)],and er[(?)],9 diphthongs,namely ai[ai],ei[ei],ao[au],iao[iau],uo[uo],ou[ou],iie[y?],iou[iou],and uei[uei],and 9 nasal finals,namely ian[i?n],uen[u(?)n],in[in],ing[i(?)],an[an],ang[a(?)],un[yn],eng[(?)]and ong[u(?)].After extracting the pronunciation fragments,I use Adobe Audition to normalize pronounce,then put them into phonetics software Praat and extracted all F1,F2,F3 data,drew vowel formant pattern to observe errors and difficulties during foreign students' learning process.All the listening test materials are monophthong or syllables,and read twice by Chinese native speakers.At the last,aiming at verifying the universality of the difficulties in learning Chinese vowels,we use 28 American students' pronunciation fragments in Chinese Interlanguage Spoken Corpus of Nanjing University,I also use the phonetics software Praat.We also send them a questionnaire to throughly understand American students' learning characteristics of Chinese vowels.There are some concentrated pronunciation errors in finals,mainly reflected in er[(?)],failing to distinguish between u-and u-,diphthongs iou[iou],uei[uei],iao[iau],the distinction between front and back nasals,and the pronunciation saturation of main vowels.In the compound vowel pronunciation part,the alliteration is not clear,vowel pronunciation dynamic process is insufficient and the tongue sliding length is too short,mouth is not fully open.So the audience can't hear it clearly.And because of abbreviation rule from the Chinese Pinyin rules,students often lose the essential vowels in uei[uei]and iou[iou]while spelling.According to their performance in phonetic experiment and questionnaire,I analyze the reason of phonetic errors from negative transfer of mother tongue,phonetic perception and production,Chinese Pinyin System Scheme,and learning strategies.Besides,this paper also put forward some teaching and learning suggestions on the basis of different Chinese levels.Considering that recent studies in Chinese pronunciation learning pay attention to primary level students,the participates in this paper are from primary class to advanced class.Some targeted proposals are put forward based on the analysis on learning difficulties.This paper use scientific experiment methods and the experimental samples are enough.Thus,we believe that the pronunciations errors which exposed in the test have certain universality,and the phonetic experiment results and suggestions are scientific and reliable.Due to the time limitation,and the author's lacking of experience in second language acquisition research field,this paper also has some places to improve.For example,we should recruit more participants,and describe the results more in detail.On the other hand,due to the limitation of the software version,there still exists some inevitable noise in the extracted phonetic data.The deficiency of theory and technology should be further improved in the future study and research.