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

Monophthongs,as the most basic segments of any language,play a vital role in language learning.Due to the distinctive segmental characteristics of Chinese and English languages,Chinese L2 learners of English are often hindered by their mother tongue when they pronounce L2 English segments,especially L2 English monophthongs for young EFL learners.However,there’s a very sparse number of empirical studies focusing on L2 English pronunciation produced by junior high school students,who are often considered as ideal subjects at the Critical Period in second language acquisition,nor is much known about their articulatory problems and acoustic features of L2 English monophthongs via systematic and scientific experiments.Based on the theoretical and practical need,this empirical study aims to explore the acquisition and acoustic features of L2 English monophthongs produced by junior high school students from Yangzhou city(hereafter JHSSsfYzC).Specifically,it intends to explore the following research questions:(1)To what extent can JHSSsfYzC acquire English monophthongs correctly?(2)What are the acoustic features of English monophthongs produced by JHSSsfYzC?(3)What are the typical errors in their production of English monophthongs?Thirty junior high school students from Yangzhou Shuren High School were selected as subjects,whose production of L2 English monophthongs were compared with two native British English speakers of Received Pronunciation(RP),who are actually English phoneticians from the University of Cambridge,UK.The target English monophthongs for the phonetic experiment were 12 English monophthongs first embedded in 31 carrier words according to three phonetic contexts,which were read in the same carrier sentence Speak_twice as the citation form and in 18 variant sentences as the connected speech.The L2 subjects’ data were recorded by a professional recorder in the multimedia language learning classroom at Shuren High School and the RP data were recorded at the Phonetic Laboratory at the University of Cambridge.All the recorded data were then digitalized and annotated,and finally analyzed acoustically via Praat 6.0.19 and statistically via Excel 2010 and SPSS 20.0.The results of the data are as follows:Firstly,in terms of the acquisition of English monophthongs the overall correct production rate(CPR)of 12 monophthongs is 87%,among all the monophthongs,the CPR of central vowels is the highest(90.5%)while the front vowels is lowest(83.5%).The CPR of all monophthongs is relatively optimistic,it can be responsible for the fact that most of the JHSSs have had relatively good English education since their early childhood and they are from quite a good urban junior high school,where the students’ English proficiency are pretty above the average.When in different phonetic contexts,in word-medial position,English monophthongs both in citation form and connected speech are generally worst acquired(81%,84%).Besides,in citation form,monophthongs in word-final are best acquired(93%)but in connected speech,monophthongs in word initial are best acquired(89%).Secondly,in terms of the acoustic features of L2 English monophthongs produced by junior high school students,three parameters,i.e.,F1,F2 and duration,were measured,which correspond to the tongue height,tongue frontness-backness and length of monophthong productions.In respect of tongue height indicated by F1,(i.e.,the bigger F1 value is,the lower tongue position is),both in the citation form and connected speech,the overall F1 values of front vowels,central vowels and back vowels produced by JHSSs are all bigger than those produced by RP speaker,which means that JHSSs tend to put their tongue lower than RP speaker when producing monophthong.In respect of tongue frontness-backness indicated by F2,(i.e.,the bigger F2 value is,the fronter tongue position is),in citation form,the overall F2 values of front vowels produced by female students are a little smaller than those produced by female RP speaker while F2 values of front vowels produced by male students are bigger than those produced by male RP speaker,which indicates that female students tend to put their tongue backer than FRP speaker while male students tend to put their tongue fronter than male RP speaker when producing front vowels.As for the central vowels and back vowels,their overall F2 values are all bigger than those produced by RP speaker,which shows that JHSSs tend to put their tongue fronter than RP speaker when producing them.In connected speech,the overall F2 values of front vowels have the same results with the citation form,that female students tend to put their tongue backer than female RP speaker while male students tend to put their tongue fronter than male RP speaker.As for the central vowels,the overall F2 values of them produced by JHSSs are generally close to those produced by RP speaker,which shows that JHSSs have relatively correct tongue frontness-backness position.As for the back vowels,their overall F2 values produced by female students are a little bigger than those produced by female RP speaker while F2 values of them produced by male students are smaller than those produced by male RP speaker,which indicates that female students tend to put their tongue fronter than female RP speaker while male students tend to put their tongue backer than male RP speaker when producing front vowelsIn respect of duration,both in citation form and connected speech,the duration of short vowels produced by JHSSs are generally longer than those produced by RP speakers while the duration of long vowels produced by JHSSs are shorter than or similar to those produced by RP speakers.Lastly,in terms of the typical errors of English monophthongs produced by JHSSs,the typical error of front vowels is wrong replacement between two monophthongs while the typical error of central vowels is omission of monophthongs,and then deviated pronunciation mostly happen in back vowels.The findings of this study have certain instructional significance to English phonetic teaching.Teachers should pay attention to the pronunciation errors and illustrate the places of articulation and manners of articulation in class;Praat software can be adopted by teachers to clearly visualize the sound so that teaching quality can be improved;teachers should try to keep improving phonetic proficiency.