A Study Of The Effectiveness Of Metalinguistic Clues And Recasts On Students’ Accurate Production Of The English Diphthongs Contrast /(?)(?)/-/e(?)/ In Senior High Schools

Corrective feedback is a timely response to learners’ incorrect expressions,urging learners to make corrections.As an important classroom teaching method,it is helpful to promote the development of learners’ second language ability.In recent years,the role of corrective feedback in language teaching has attracted extensive attention in the field of second language acquisition.However,a plenty of the researches on corrective feedback focuses on grammar form,vocabulary,writing and other teaching aspects,while there is little research on how to apply corrective feedback in phonetics teaching.In addition,it is rare to apply corrective feedback to phonetics research in primary and secondary school.Previous studies focused on adult learners.Therefore,this thesis explores the effectiveness of corrective feedback,metalinguistic clues and recasts on Chinese senior high school students’ production of English diphthongs contrast /(?)(?)/-/e(?)/.By comparing and analyzing the differences between Chinese senior high school students and native speakers,it investigates whether the two corrective feedbacks are effective on their production,and the long-term effect on phonetic development.This thesis will address the research questions below:1)What are the differences of English diphthongs contrast /(?)(?)/-/e(?)/ produced by senior high school students speaking mandarin and English native speakers ?2)Which is more effective,recasts or metalinguistic clues,for English diphthongs contrast /(?)(?)/-/e(?)/ produced by senior high school students?3)Do recasts and metalinguistic clues have a long-term impact on the phonetic development of senior high school students?This study was conducted in Beimen Middle School in Hubei Province,and 48 senior high school students were selected as experimental subjects.They were randomly divided into three groups,each group has 16 students,recasts group(male 8;female 8),metalinguistic clues group(male 8;female 8)and control group(male 7;female 9),and each subject filled out the background information questionnaire and informed consent form.The whole experiment lasted for 7 weeks,including a pre-test,four treatment sessions,an immediate post-test and a delayed post-test,and each test consists of a spontaneous production test and a controlled production test.The treatment session includes explicit phonetics teaching and two interactive tasks,namely English Karuta game and fill-in-the-blank game,each of which lasts about 30 minutes.The experiment consists of 12 pairs of English minimal pairs and the same number of distractors.All production samples will be annotated,extracted in Praat6.0.31 and analyzed in SPSS 26.0.Firstly,the basic acoustic parameters of English diphthongs contrast were extracted in Praat 6.0.31: five points of the first formant(F1),five points of the second formant(F2),the duration of diphthongs and the duration of transition.And the rate of changes(ROC)of the second formant(F2)on the transition section was sorted out and calculated in Excel.Then,in SPSS 26.0,multi-factor ANOVA and repeated measurement ANOVA were used to analyze the acoustic parameters obtained from the three tests.This paper drew the following conclusions:1)There are differences between senior high school students and native speakers in the first formant(F1),second formant(F2),the duration of diphthongs,the duration of transition and the rate of changes(ROC).And their duration of pronunciation,duration of transitions and the values of rate of changes are always higher than those of native speakers.2)Recasts and metalinguistic clues are both helpful to the production of senior high school students.For diphthongs /(?)(?)/,metalinguistic clues are more effective than recasts.However,for diphthongs /e(?)/,in the immediate post-test,metalinguistic clues are more effective for female subjects,but in the delayed post-test,there is no significant differences between metalinguistic clues group and recast group.For male subjects,the effectiveness of recast and metalinguistic clues is similar.However,the effectiveness of metalinguistic clues is slightly better than that of recasts.3)Recast and metalinguistic clues have long-term effect on phonetic development.Moreover,the long-term effect of metalanguage clues is better.Through the study,it is found that corrective feedback can promote the production of English diphthongs of senior high school students.In the future pronunciation teaching,it is suggested that teachers use corrective feedback to provide target sounds so as to develop learners’ self-correction ability and promote second language acquisition.