An Empirical Study On The Phonetic Error Analysis Of English Major Freshmen

Traditionally many scholars and teachers assumed that errors have only one cause,namely the native language transfer.But the interlanguage theory holds that a systematic study of the errors occurred in the learning process together with the reasons behind,that is,the error analysis,can reveal the progress and rules in second Language acquisition,which has a vital importance for foreign language teaching.In recent years,the study of second language acquisition is becoming more and more extensive,while phonetic errors still lack systematic study and a comprehensive explanation for these errors.Given the current conditions,this thesis tries to analyze the segmental errors and those of word stress under the framework of the interlanguage theory and figures out the reasons behind through data analysis.The research selects 125 English major freshmen from a university in Shanghai as the subjects.After the questionnaire survey at the very beginning of college life,subjects toke three oral tests conducted in September 2015,January 2016 and June 2016 respectively and their readings were recorded.To rule avoid unnecessary interference,three tests adopt the same test paper and readings of the subjects were recorded simultaneously in the audio-visual classrooms.Then with the aid of Praat,collected recordings are evaluated and transcribed according to the criteria lay down by the supervisors.Processing the data collected and contrasting the frequencies of each error type,this thesis tries to find the changes of each error type in a whole year and the reasons behind.This can be called a vertical or diachronic contrast.This research also selects candidates of relatively better and poor performance,2 for each group.They were interviewed semi-openly and the content was transcribed to explore the problems and reasons of their English learning.Apart from the invalid recordings files due to equipment problems and improper operation,the research collects the material from a total of 110 candidates.Effective recordings of the three tests last nearly 430 minutes,collecting 3102 errors in aggregation.Comparing the frequency changes of each error type,this research proposes the intralingual and interlingual reasons for these errors in combination with results from the interview and assistant manual records.The result shows that vowels like/i/,/e/,/(?)/,/(?)/,and consonants/r/,/(?)/,/v/are often pronounced mistakenly,while the phenomena of epenthesis and swallowing sound mainly occur at the word-final position.These are the key and difficult points in the future English teaching.Research also finds that after a period of learning,the lack of phonetic knowledge is no longer the main reason for elision;learners’ excessive application of rules like liaison also cannot be ignored.Moreover,data shows that in the posttest,the frequency of learners’ word stress displacement rebounds after the progress in the prior two test,which is confirmed by SPSS analysis.Therefore,this study suggests that learners’ word stress learning may reach a "plateau stage",that is,after a period of progress,there will be stagnation or even retrogression in their proficiency of English word stress.This may be due to the difficulty of word stress for Chinese English learners.If learners pay less attention to word stress and practice less before really internalizing the relevant knowledge,their proficiency may remain constant or even decline.On the basis of the research findings,the thesis will accordingly make some suggestions for particular pitfalls in phonetic learning,hopefully providing efficient reference for future English teaching and learning.