A Study On Teaching Methods Of English Pronunciation For English Majors In Higher Vocational Technical Colleges

Pronunciation is an extremely important course for the students in the English departments of higher vocational technical colleges (HVTC’s). It deeply influences the basic skills of speaking, listening, reading, and writing, and the course forms the very basis of numerous applied language abilities. Many people now realize the importance of having standardized pronunciation; however, achieving that goal of standard pronunciation has been the most elusive of all the problems faced by English L2 learners.At present, we can find a great deal of research about phonetics, both in China and abroad, but research specifically about the problems in pronunciation faced by students, and their solutions, is relatively scarce. Concurrently, many teachers in colleges ignore the teaching of pronunciation due to its relatively minor emphasis in our standard examinations (CET4, TEM4, TEM8). Not surprisingly, English majors’pronunciation is not satisfactory, particularly among those students in the HVTC’s who did not achieve as high a score in the National Entrance Examination. That handicap, combined with a weak base of prior English learning, makes further learning even more difficult to achieve independently.1This subject of this thesis is to discover the problems that influence the students’ correct pronunciation through means of a questionnaire and tests taken in the author’s regular teaching of a phonetics course. This study spans a 14-week regular teaching term starting on October 8th,2009, and the subjects being the freshmen in the English Education class of the English department in Huangshi Polytechnical College. By means of careful observations and studying the students’responses in the questionnaires, the author was able to determine the factors that influence the students’pronunciation. Additionally, two tests, a pretest given on the first day and a posttest at the end of the term, were administered. By comparing the data from these two tests, we can realize some valuable insights and gain valuable feedback.Some teaching strategies which can help the students correct their pronunciation mistakes have been stated by the writer. These strategies are based on the Behaviorism which is the principle of all the experimental teaching methods. On this principle, mechanical practice is the necessity of learning. The employment of activities in the class is to motivate the interests of students. In addition, the utilization of autonomous learning and acoustic analyzing software are two effective experimental methods of the researcher.Initial analysis of the pretest showed that the students have more problems in the supra-segmental level than in the segmental level. The affective factors, mother tongue, exposure to an English environment, and the learner’s innate abilities, may impact pronunciation.In short, this study focuses on ways of helping students discover their own mistakes in pronunciation and to independently develop effective strategies for their correction, as these are vital skills for the success of an English major in the HVTC’s.