A Study On The Diagnostic Assessment Of Chinese EFL Learners' Phoneme Pronunciation And Its Validation

Diagnostic language assessment is gaining a lot of attention home and abroad in the field of EFL teaching and learning.Among all language competences,pronunciation is often considered as an indispensable part of a language and the foundation of language learning.However,the research on pronunciation assessment lags behind that of other language competences for decades.With a recent surge of interest in diagnostic language assessment,there seems to be an urgent need to assess EFL learners' pronunciation competence and to testify the effect of diagnostic assessment on EFL pronunciation teaching and learning.Applying diagnostic assessment to EFL phoneme pronunciation teaching and learning and based on the principle of diagnostic assessment,the study aims to answer the following questions:1)What are the results of EFL learners' self-assessment of their pronunciation of English phonemes?2)Are there any mismatches between learners' self-assessment and their actual pronunciation competence?3)What is the effect of diagnostic assessment on EFL learners' phoneme pronunciation performance?4)Do EFL learners have different phoneme pronunciation performance in controlled context and spontaneous context after the application of diagnostic assessment?67 freshmen from a leading university in China participated in this research.46 of them were English majors,assigned as experimental group,and 21 of them were nonEnglish majors,designated as control group.The participants' English phoneme pronunciation level was measured before the research.Then the experimental group employed diagnostic assessment based English pronunciation teaching mode(diagnosis-feedback-instruction),while the control group received traditional teaching mode.After 8 weeks,the author adopted self-assessment,phonetic test,and interview to collect research data.SPSS 19.0 was used to analyze the data collected.The research findings were as follows: 1)The experimental group and control group were at similar English phoneme pronunciation level before the conduction of the study,while the experimental group surpassed the control group after the experiment.2)The results of students' self-assessment of English phoneme pronunciation were higher than their actual pronunciation performance in both the pretest and posttest.3)Diagnostic assessment had a noticeably positive effect on EFL learners' phoneme pronunciation.4)The improvement was more obvious in controlled context than in spontaneous context.Based on the research findings,the author proposes that,diagnostic assessment helps to facilitate EFL pronunciation teaching and learning.Besides,the advancement of competence in controlled context is more obvious than in spontaneous context.Theoretically,this study provides some empirical evidence for the validity of diagnostic assessment.Empirically,this study explores an effective method to enhance English phoneme pronunciation teaching and learning.