A Survey Of L2 English Plosives Acquired By Junior High School Students

All languages in the world have plosives and they are among the most frequently used consonants in the phonetic systems of language.Affected by L1 Mandarin,Chinese EFL learners’ mastery of English plosives is not optimistic.However,there are not any empirical studies focusing on junior high school students’ acquisition and pronunciation problems of English plosives.Based on the theoretical and practical need,this empirical study aims to explore the acquisition and acoustic features of L2 English plosives acquired by junior high school students(hereafter JHSSs)by focusing on the following research questions:(1)To what extent can junior high school students acquire English plosives correctly?(2)What are the acoustic features of English plosives produced by junior high school students?(3)What are the typical errors in the pronunciation of English plosives produced by junior high school students?(4)What are the effects of gender on junior high school students’ production of English plosives?A phonetic experimental design was adopted and 30 junior high school students from Yangzhou City were selected as the subjects,whose production of L2 English plosives were compared to those pronounced by two native British English speakers of Received Pronunciation(RP),who are actually two English Phoneticians,from University of Cambridge,UK.The target plosives were 6 English plosives embedded in 18 carrier words in three phonetic contexts(word-initial,-medial,and-final),which were read by the subjects both in the same carrier sentence Say______again as citation form and 7 variant carrier sentences as connected speech.The data of the L2 subjects were recorded via SonyPCM-D50 at a quiet language lab in the chosen middle school,while the data of native RP speakers were recorded at Cambridge University Phonetic Laboratory respectively.All the recorded data were then annotated and analyzed acoustically via Praat 6019 64 and statistically via SPSS 22.0 and Excel 2016.The results of the data analyses are as follows:(1)In terms of the acquisition of English plosives,the overall correct production rates(hereafter CPRs)of English plosives produced by the subjects are 89.81%in citation form and 92.41%in connected speech,with an average overall CPR 91.11%.This seemingly optimistic results might be explained by the fact that most of the subjects have had good English education since their early childhood(often from their kindergarten)and they are from a quite top urban high school,where the students’ English proficiency are usually above the average in all.CPRs of English plosives in three phonetic contexts are uneven,i.e.,96.67%in word-initial positions,95.98%in word-medial positions,and 80.69%in word-final positions.This indicates that it is quite difficult for young Chinese EFL learners to acquire English plosives in word-final positions and the possible reason may lie in the fact that our L1 Mandarin does not have consonants,particularly plosives as codas,an assumed explanation from Language Transfer Theory.(2)In terms of acoustic features(duration and VOT),the English plosives produced by junior high school students show differences with those produced by RP speakers in different genres.Duration of voiceless plosives in word-initial positions produced by L2 subjects are longer than native RP speakers due to slow speaking rate and low intensity.Duration and VOT of English plosives in word-final positions produced by L2 subjects are longer than native RP speakers due to the lengthened release of the coda portion,which often sounds foreign accents to native ears.(3)In terms of erroneous pronunciation of English plosives,three typical categories are found as following:1)Epcnthesis of schwa/(?)/is the most common at coda plosives,which is followed by omission of coda plosives.Both of these two kinds of erroneous pronunciation can be traced to the different syllable structures in English and Mandarin Chinese;2)Inaccurate vocal folds vibration happens when L2 subjects mispronounce voiceless plosives with vocal folds vibration;3)Voiceless plosives are often replaced by fricatives or fricative-featured voiceless plosives,especially for/p/and/t/,which has no obvious spike at all in the closure phase.This indicates that the subjects are short of correct articulatory knowledge of English plosives and don’t know how to distinguish the features of English plosives in word-initial and word-final phonetic contexts.(4)In terms of the effects of gender on the production of English plosives,no hugely significant differences are found in the production of English plosives between male and female subjects in general.This is fairly different from the general assumption that young female students are better at English pronunciation than male counterparts.Therefore,there is no need for high school English teachers to conduct differentiated instruction to students in different gender in their oral English instruction,including English segments.The results above provide some pedagogical implications for English pronunciation teaching as well as oral English teaching in high school.First of all,English teachers should be fully aware of the distinct articulatory gestures and different acoustic features of English plosives in the word-initial,word-medial,and word-final positions so that they can teach students correctly.Secondly,teachers should also realize that there are some differences for English plosives to be pronounced between the citation form and connected speech so as to highlight the correct and natural pronunciation of English plosives,which can be only acquired by explicit perception and production training.Finally,teachers should try to take advantages of some phonetic synthesizing and analysis tools,such as Praat software,to visualize and illustrate the acoustic features and articulatory qualities of English plosives,which will definitely arouse the students’ interest in English phonetics learning,and enhance their theory-based knack of English segments and oral English with the help of high-tech software,visualized tools and inspiring training.