An Empirical Study Of Chinese College Students' Acquisition Of English Consonants

As a second language in China,English has been significant for Chinese college students.Speech sounds are regarded as information carrier.The correctness of pronunciation affects the accuracy of information transmission and success of communication.Chinese and English are two different languages with distinctive phonetic features.Those differences will have effects on pronunciation learning of EFL learners,which leads to deviation in pronunciation.Actually,many domestic and overseas linguists have studied second language acquisition more intensively,but phonetic errors,especially in English consonants,lack systematical research and a comprehensive explanation for these errors.This thesis aims to study the problems and factors of pronunciation of English consonants made by Chinese college students.Based on Contrastive Analysis,Error Analysis and Interlanguage Theory in second language acquisition,the author visualizes the pronunciation problems of 30 postgraduates of non-English majors from Shanghai Normal University by Praat,a professional phonetic software.The experiment includes two parts: research on consonantal pronunciation and questionnaires of phonetic acquisition.Research materials designed by the author cover all the single consonants and common kinds of consonant clusters.The relevant audio data were extracted by Cool Edit pro then corresponding spectrograms were generated by Praat.The author annotated all the spectrograms in order to make careful observation and comparison.The comparison was conducted based on some acoustic parameters such as spike,gap,fill,voice var,formant transitions,VOT,etc.Besides,time-duration,distribution of noise and intensity or frequency can also reflect some problems in pronunciation.Meanwhile,the data of phonetic acquisition questionnaires were collated,inducted and counted by Excel.Based on the result,the author analyzes and discusses causes for errors in pronunciation.By comparing the pronunciation of the native speaker and Chinese postgraduates of non-English majors and analyzing their acoustic features,the author summarizes common errors and special errors due to local dialects respectively based on experiment results.She also finds that epenthesis,elision and substitution exist both in single consonants and consonant clusters,and error probabilities of them are different.The author summarizes five aspects of problems in English consonant pronunciation of Chinese college students: confusion with Chinese consonants,confusion of similar phonemes,positional variants,inaccurate place of articulation and bad habits of pronunciation like elision and epenthesis.The causes for these problems lie in the lack of phonetic knowledge,negative transfer from mother tongue and the lack of practicing and training.Based on the research findings,the author presents corresponding solutions and offers some suggestions for phonetic teaching and learning.