A Corpus-Based Study On Fuzhou EFL Learners' Phonetic Acquisition

As the most widely used language in the world,English accounts for a critical part in Chinese daily studying and life.Therefore,it is of great importance to master English in order to realize better communication.Gimson(1989)pointed out the importance of pronunciation in the acquisition of a new language,hence this research is designed to study Chinese students' English phonetic acquisition.Furthermore,phonetic acquisition consists of many aspects,such as vowels,consonants,stress,and intonation,etc,among which vowels are the core of pronunciation,and English is a stress-timed language.Therefore,the key and difficult points,namely English learners' acquisition of vowels and stress,are mainly investigated in this research.Fuzhou,which is the capital of Fujian province,is a significant place of exporting and importing.Moreover,East Min dialect can be divided into Northern and Southern subgroups,and Fuzhou dialect is the representative of East Min dialect.This study chooses Fuzhou as a case to study English learners' acquisition so as to provide a little help for them.In short,this research aims to investigate Fuzhou English learners'phonetic acquisition,specifically the acquisition of vowels and stress.In regard to vowels,this study mainly focuses on Fuzhou learners' acquisition of monophthongs.Relevant studies mainly focus on the transfer of dialect on English learning.However,besides dialect,Chinese students learn Mandarin before English studying.Therefore,Mandarin might also influence English learning.This study combines dialect and Mandarin together to investigate the transfer of them on Fuzhou learners' monophthongs' acquisition.This study mainly adopts language transfer theory and Speech Learning Model.First of all,the author compares learners' English pronunciation of the vowels that exist both in Chinese and English(such as/a/,/i/and/u/)with that of native speakers so as to find out the convergences and divergences between them.Then the English pronunciation is compared to learners' pronunciation of dialect and Mandarin in order to explore the transfer of them on English learning.Second,the acquisition of vowels that only exist in English is studied to explore the acquisition condition of these vowels.Moreover,the author also compares whether Fuzhou learners are able to distinguish the sounding-similar vowels,such as/?/and/(?)/,/i/and/i/,etc.With respect to the acquisition of stress,the current study chiefly concentrates on Fuzhou learners' phonetic realization of stress.Studies on stress mainly adopt Stress Deafness Model and Stress Typology Model,which illustrate the difficulties in L2 acquisition caused by the hierarchies between L1 and L2.In this study,from the perspective of acoustic experiment,the author adopts Focus to Accent theory and uses the combination of two annotating approaches IViE&ToBI to investigate the distinctions of pitch contours between Fuzhou learners and native speakers.As for Fuzhou English learners' monophthongs' acquisition,data analyses yield the following findings:(1)Fuzhou learners acquire vowel/i/best and do not differ from native speakers;(2)Some vowels' pronunciation is influenced by dialect,such as/(?)/,while some vowels' production is affected by Mandarin,such as/a/,and several vowels' pronunciation is influenced by both dialect and Mandarin,like/u/;(3)For some similar vowels,Fuzhou learners fail to distinguish them and tend to adopt the pronunciation of one that exists in dialect to substitute the other one in English,such as/?/-/(?)/pair;(4)Fuzhou learners fail to produce the retroflex/?/well due to the deep-rooted dialect habit.When it comes to the acquisition of stress,the major findings are presented as follows:(1)Fuzhou learners either fail to realize pitch raising on the stressed syllable,or fail to realize pitch compression after the accented syllable;(2)With the increasing of syllables of the focused words,Fuzhou learners suffer from more problems,such as the misplacement of the word stress;(3)Fuzhou learners are inclined to employ the intonation type "H*L" in declarative sentences so as to cause foreign accent,not flexible like native speakers' ups and downs in the intonation.Finally,the author gives some tips in accordance with the results of the research,wishing to provide some guidance for Fuzhou learners' English studying.In addition,limitations of this research are analyzed for evoking further studies.