An OT Analysis Of The Acquisition Of English Consonants And Consonant Clusters By Chinese Learners Of English

No matter how many years they have learned English, most Chinese learners of English (CLES) still have difficulties in phonological skills. This phenomenon urges L2phonology to be focused. The present researcher has generated a lot of interest to it as well, and decided to have a further research on the pronunciation problems in English consonants and consonant clusters on the basis of Chinese-English syllable structure comparison.Optimality Theory (OT) is a powerful theory to explain the L2phonology. According to OT, language consists of a set of different-ranking of constraints. The production of new languages varies with the violatable re-ranking of constraints. The re-ranking of constraints exists in both native language and target language, therefore, OT can not only explain the common features of all languages, but also explain the unique features of a specific language.At present, the domestic research of L2phonology with OT is not popular enough. And only a few researchers are engaged in this field. Through this paper, the author expects to contribute to this research area with the study of the acquisition of English consonants and consonant clusters by Chinese learners of English.The paper will focus on the following three research questions:1) What are the problems in pronouncing ECS and ECCS by CLES?2) What kinds of factors influence the acquisition of ECS and ECCS by CLES?3) How to solve the problems in OT account?The subjects of the research include10Chinese natives speakers majored in English who are randomly chosen from the freshmen of FLD in QAU and1native English speaker as a control group to judge the accuracy of the pronunciation of the10subjects. The target materials contain2parts:the questionnaire and reading materials. The questionnaire is used to check the subjects back ground of L2phonology. And the reading materials, material1is a word list with30English consonants, material2is another word list with30English consonants clusters, carrying the words consisting of2,3and4consonant clusters.The instruments employed in this research are a voice pen for the pilot study and a laptop installed with the Cool Edit2.0Software for data collection, Praat for data transcription and SPSS17.0for data analysis. The research procecess will have pilot study first, and then the research project, both of which will be presented by data collection, transcription and final analysis.Based on the previous theories and methodologies in the SLA of ECS and ECCS, the present researcher put forward three hypotheses.1) There really exist many problems in pronouncing ECS and ECCS by the CLES. The problems are mainly focused on such three types as epenthesis, deletion, substitution. And which type of simplification strategy to be used by the learners will be determined by the different ranking of the constraints in their native language syllable structure.2) There are distinguished features of constraints hierarchy in English consonants and consonant clusters by CLES. The present research will begin with the analysis of the number of the English consonants and consonant clusters, the features of specific consonants and consonant clusters as well as the individual difference of the subjects to explain the reasons for the error types.3) Optimality Theory not only complemented the shortcomings of the previous theories, but developed its own unique advantages. It is a so strong power that can explain and analyze the problems in the pronunciation of English consonants and consonant clusters by CLES. That is, the constraints are positioned high in the complex coda which are disallowed in Chinese syllable structure. Therefore, the CLES have to undergo the demotion of the markedness constraints in order to have a better acquisition of ECS and ECCS.The present research firstly combines English consonants with consonant clusters under the framework of OT. Compared with the previous studies, which either only focus on final English consonants or final consonant dusters, the present research is more comprehensive and more systematic and it will benefit the L2 consonant acquisition to deeper development. The research then empirically proves and analyses the different re-ranking of constraints hierarchy in L2phonology under the framework of OT. Finally, pedagogy plays a guiding role in teaching phonetics. EFL teachers can break through the teaching model of perceptual blind error correction, start with the analysis of pronouncing mistakes in ECS and ECCS to help the students reduce the pronunciation mistakes rationally from the basis of different re-ranking constraints hierarchy in native and target language, and improve the self-awareness of L2phonology. In addition, the10subjects and the total600words chosen by the present research have a certain value in the establishment of speech database of our university and the related researches in the future.