An Acoustic Study On Liaoning Mongoljin EFL Learners' Production Of English Monophthongs

This thesis probed into Mongoljin EFL learners' English monophthong production through an acoustic study.The comparative studies between Mongoljin and English phonological systems made it possible to investigate the properties of Mongoljin EFL learners' English monophthong production and the native language transfer effect on Mongoljin EFL learners' English monophthong production.With the aid of PRAAT software,the first and second formant values of Mongoljin monophthongs and English monophthongs produced by 20 Mongoljin EFL learners(10 males and 10 females)from Mongolian Experimental Middle School and Mongolian Senior Middle School in Fuxin Mongolian Autonomous County were measured.After regulation,data measured by PRAAT were compared with the data measured by Deterding(1997)in his study for English monophthongs produced by RP native speakers.Results of the comparative studies are as follows: Mongoljin EFL learners' productions of English monophthongs /?:/,/?/ and /?:/ were acoustically more similar to Mongoljin counterpart monophthongs than RP;While the productions of English monophthongs /?/ and /?/ had tendencies toward RP acoustically,which was because the two Mongoljin monophthong counterparts /?/ and /a/ got closer vowel position to RP.The two conditions above suggested that no matter the production of English monophthongs was mother tongue-like or was English native-like,the reason behind the phenomenon is the profound influence from learners' mother tongue.For the productions of English /?/,/u:/,/i:/ and /?:/,they had achieved positions that were neither acoustically close to any of the allegedly counterpart positions in the Mongoljin vowel system,nor similar to the target points attained by their closest vowels in the English vowel system,which could be interpreted by Speech Learning Model and Perceptual Assimilation Model that learners established new phonetic categories for the vowel contrasts that were not used in their native phonological system.The results of this study have positive significance for English pronunciation teaching in Mongoljin area.Mongoljin EFL learners and their teachers should pay attention to the differences between Mongoljin dialect sound system and English sound system,so as to prevent the negative transfer of the mother tongue to their English pronunciations.