The Investigation Of The Pronunciation Self-concept, Phonological Awareness And English Pronunciation Performance Of Freshman College English Majors

Pronunciation self-concept attains more and more concern from the foreign language teaching studies.It is its motivational feature that impacts learners' whole English competence and further affects their English achievements.Phonological awareness also receives lots of interest of researchers at home and abroad because of its important influence on reading,developmental dyslexia and word recognition.However,research on the overall picture of first year English majors' pronunciation self-concept,pronunciation performance and phonological awareness is scarce,not to mention the interrelationship among them.This study aims to investigate the overall tendency of first year English majors' pronunciation self-concept,pronunciation performance and phonological awareness,the relationship between their English pronunciation self-concept and phonological awareness,the interrelationship among the three elements.Whole English self-concept scale,pronunciation self-concept scale and phonological awareness scale are distributed among 90 first year English majors.Also their English pronunciation performance is examined in a final pronunciation test.All the data are analyzed with the help of SPPS 13.0 and descriptive statistics and correlation analysis.The first year English majors' English pronunciation self-concept is relatively positive whereas their phonological awareness isn't high.In general,they pronounce clearly and understandably with natural rhythm and intonation.However,they pay less attention to the suprasegmental phonemes in comparison with the individual sounds.There is a reciprocally significant correlation among their English pronunciation self-concept,phonological awareness and English pronunciation performance.The findings of this study provide detailed information about first year English majors' pronunciation self-concept,pronunciation performance and phonological awareness as well as their interrelationship.Also they give some pedagogical implications for classroom students and teachers.