A Contrastive Study Of The Features Of English Closing Diphthongs Produced By Dalian English Learners And American English Native Speakers

Vowels are indispensable elements in every human language,the acquisition of which plays a vital part in the determination of performances in speech productions.In a way,the acquisition of vowels can be treated as the reflection of one's mastery of a language.Compared with monophthongs,diphthongs are more complicated in terms of pronunciations,which deserve special focus and which pose greater difficulties for learners to acquire.Due to the differences between Chinese and English,the acquisition of vowels by English learners have drawn a considerable amount of attention;however,the empirical studies on diphthongs produced by those who come form dialectal areas can rarely be found.Therefore,this thesis is aimed at filling in the gaps by means of embracing closing diphthongs produced by Dalian English learners as the entry point,which is hoped to explore the deviations in their pronunciations and provide some implications for pronunciation teaching.This research attempts to investigate and analyze the deviations shown in the production of English closing diphthongs by Dalian English learners from the perspective of acoustic phonetics.In this research,15 English words that contain five closing diphthongs produced by two groups of participants were chosen from AESOP-CASS(Asian English Speech Corpus Project-Chinese Academy of Social Sciences).Specifically,50 Dalian English learners(25 females and 25 males)together with 10 American English native speakers(5 females and 5 males)were involved.At the same time,Praat,a sound analyzing and processing software,was aided to annotate the research materials,which provided the necessary acoustic parameters,including the first and the second formant and duration,followed by rate of change.Subsequently,Excel was employed to tabulate,collect and analyze the data.Concretely,the data obtained would be contrasted between two groups,the results of which were believed to reveal the deviations in pronunciations by English learners.The research questions raised in this thesis are as follows:1.What are the differences in the features of the production of closingdiphthongs between Dalian English learners and American English native speakers?2.What influences do Dalian dialect exert on the acquisition of closing diphthongs produced by Dalian English learners?The results indicate that the overall production of closing diphthongs by Dalian English learners is far from optimistic and that Dalian dialect is considered to interfere with the acquisition of English speech sounds:1.Differences in the features of closing diphthongs produced by Dalian English learners and American English speakers:(1)Formants: With regard to the starting phase of closing diphthongs,in contrast to native speakers,Dalian English learners possess higher F1 and lower F2 values,which shows that their tongue is placed at a lower and backer position.It is true of the ending phase in which closing diphthongs are produced lower and backer as well;(2)Durations: Closing diphthongs articulated by Dalian English learners are congruously shorter than those by native speakers,which manifests that English learners cannot appropriately take hold of the time taken in pronunciations;(3)Rate of change:Dalian English learners are characterized with lower abstract values of formant rate of change of F1 and F2 in all the five closing diphthongs,which demonstrates that diphthongal movement is insufficient in both tongue height and tongue advancement.2.Dialectal influences exerting on the acquisition of closing diphthongs by English learners:(1)Formants: When producing Chinese closing diphthongs,in contrast to Mandarin speakers,Dalian speakers are equipped with lower F1 and F2 values,which proves that their tongue is put at the higher and backer position at the starting and ending phase of speech sounds.Since they are prone to pronounce English counterparts with higher tongue height and backer tongue advancement,it can be noticed that Dalian dialect plays a negative role in tongue advancement rather than tongue height;(2)Durations: Chinese closing diphthongs are produced much longer by Dalian speakers;however,English counterparts are produced much shorter,which declares that Dalian dialect poses no negative impact on pronunciations of English sounds;(3)Rate of change: In the articulation of Chinese closing diphthongs,Dalianspeakers present lower abstract values of ROC F1 and ROC F2,which attests that diphthongization is inadequate;similarly,ROC F1 and ROC F2 values of English closing diphthongs by Dalian English learners are lower than those by native speakers.Consequently,diphthongal movement is insufficient in both tongue height and tongue advancement,which further validates the negative transfer of Dalian dialect.The findings of the thesis are conducive to second language speech teaching.Foremost,Dalian English learners have quite a few problems in their production of closing diphthongs,pushing both teachers and students to lay emphasis on pronunciation pedagogy,which has been long ignored.Secondly,pronunciation should be more comprehensive.On the one hand,teachers ought to provide students with some knowledge related to phonetics in order to make them better master the skills and manners in articulation of English speech sounds;on the other hand,modern techniques,Praat,for example,can be used in actual classroom so that English learners' problems in pronunciations can be better revealed,which is beneficial to their improvement of oral English.Last but not least,teachers are supposed to be fully aware of the negative transfer of different dialects and spare no effort to reduce them to the minimum.