An Analysis Of English Consonant Pronunciation Of Chifeng EFL Teachers

Pronunciation is the first of the three elements of a language and it is the external shell of language.EFL teachers play the most important roles in students' language learning.Thus,they are expected to have standard pronunciation and adequate professional knowledge of phonetics and phonology.This thesis aims to discover the features of English consonant pronunciation of Chifeng EFL teachers and the related inducing factors.With the help of the theoretical basis of acoustic phonetics,L2 acquisition theories and perceptual theories,the author visualizes the pronunciation problems of 10 subjects chosen from Chifeng EFL teachers by using Praat — a professional acoustic phonetic software.The pronunciation features are examined by the sound recordings based on the research material with single phonemes and the words and phrases which covers all the English consonants in different phonetic contexts.The problems have been figured out according to the acoustic parameters like the time duration,the blank,the spike,the voice bar,etc.In addition,formant transitions,the VOT,the intensity values,and the pitch values can reveal the pronunciation problems.By comparing and analyzing the results of the spectrograms of Chifeng EFL teachers with the Received Pronunciation(RP)of English,we found that the English consonant pronunciation problems of the subjects lie in 5 aspects: articulatory inertia,confusion of English initial consonants with Chinese ones,inappropriate place of articulation,the problems of positional variants and the exchanging of different consonant phonemes.There also exists a phenomenon between the single phonemes and the phonemes in contexts: the single English consonant phoneme that are confused by Chifeng EFL teachers may not be confused in some word positions.The analysis has been made of the results of the interviews with 12 questions about subjects' attitudes and beliefs in English learning and teaching.The main cause of the problems made by Chifeng EFL teachers has been divided into three parts:(1)the lack of basic phonetics knowledge,(2)the unaware mother tongue transfer and(3)the lack of practicing and follow-up training.In response to these phenomena and inducing factors,the author puts forward some feasible suggestions for Chifeng EFL teachers.