Effects Of Perceptual Training On The Perception And Production Of Diphthongs By Elementary School EFL Learners

Speech perception is mainly studied from two aspects: perception and production.In recent years,the research on perception and production at home and abroad has mainly just focused on the description of the current status of the sound segment.While the research on speech training has not been implemented on a large scale.Therefore,the speech training experiment is conducted based on the transfer-ability of perception ability to production ability in this thesis(Barry,1989;Bradlow & Pisoni,1997).English diphthongs have obvious sliding processes between the two tongues position in the pronunciation process.While the similar sounds of English diphthongs in Chinese,i.e.compound finals,do not have obvious sliding.According to the single category assimilation,English diphthongs /a(?)/,/e(?)/,/a(?)/ are predicted to be prone to cause acquisition problems.In addition,it is hard for foreign language learners to fully acquire the target language speech,if they have missed the critical period of second language phonetic learning.While elementary school EFL learners(ESEFLLs)still retain the ability to learn phonetic perception and production of foreign language who are still in the critical period of language learning.Therefore,the perceptual training may have obvious effect in improving the speech perception and production ability for ESEFLLs.In view of the above-mentioned current status,this study takes the three English diphthongs /a(?)/,/e(?)/,/a(?)/,which are difficult for English learners to acquire and easy to confuse,as examples to conduct pretest,perceptual training(including audiovisual perceptual training and audio-only perceptual training)and posttest experimental research.Through studying the perception and production status of the three representative diphthongs and comparing the effects of different perceptual training,this thesis further expands the empirical research on speech perceptual training,and explores whether the improvement of diphthongs’ perception ability can improve the production ability.In the end,some reference suggestions for English diphthongs teaching are provided based on the research results.The following are the research questions:(1)What are the current status of English diphthong’s perception and production of ESEFLLs? Are there any differences among the acquisition levels of different diphthong?(2)Do ESEFLLs improve their perception and production ability after receiving perceptual training? If so,is it better to improve the perception and production of English diphthongs in AV perception training than in A-only perception training?(3)Are there any relationships between the perception and production of English diphthong for ESEFLLs?The results of the study show that the overall accuracy of ESEFLLs’ perception of English diphthongs is at a low level which expands the empirical studies of using perception theory to the prediction of segmental perception difficulties.In addition,ESEFLLs are not very sensitive to visual information in the pre-test.Similarly,the status of production is consistent with the status of perception at a low level.Comparing the results of the pretest and posttest,it is found that the perceptual training has a significant effect on improving the perception and production abilities of ESEFLLs.But for the improvement of perception ability,audiovisual training is not significantly better than audio-only training.However,the advantages of audiovisual training can still be found by comparing statistical parameters such as the mean value and effect size.As for the improvement of production ability,audiovisual perceptual training can be significantly better to improve the production ability of diphthongs/a(?)/ and /a(?)/.Research on the relationships between perception and production found that there is a moderately positive correlation between the perception and production of ESEFLLs in post-test.And ESEFLLs’ improvement from perceptual training in perception and production are also positively correlated with a moderate degree.The above research results not only expand the empirical study of perception theory,but also provide reference suggestions for elementary school English learners to acquire English diphthongs.According to the effects of perception training and the positive correlation between perception and production,English phonetics teachers can train perception and production simultaneously in teaching which can improve the perception and production ability better.Moreover,teachers can also try to use audiovisual perception training to promote students’ learning on English diphthongs more effectively.