An Empirical Study Of English Phonological Skills Of College Students Based On Musical Aptitude

The acquisition of foreign language pronunciation is influenced by many linguistic factors and non-linguistic factors.The existing literatures have suggested that music and language have many similarities and also may share the same cerebral processing mechanism.Enlightened by these studies,more and more scholars abroad have paid attention to the correlation between musical aptitude and foreign(or second)language acquisition.The participants studied by scholars abroad are different from Chinese students who regard Chinese as mother tongue and English as foreign language.China has a large number of English learners.However,the relevant empirical studies in China are rare.Thus,the present empirical study,selecting Chinese college students as participants,tries to explore the correlation between musical aptitude and English phonological skills.The data were collected through three tests(Advanced Measures of Music Audiation,receptive English phonological skills test,and productive English phonological skills test)and one questionnaire(musical experiences questionnaire).Except for AMMA,the rest two tests and one questionnaire were designed by the researcher herself.Thus,item analysis,reliability analysis and validity analysis were conducted for them.The results showed that all of them have good discrimination,reliability and validity.In this thesis,three research questions in all were raised.The answers for research questions were obtained by virtue of correlation analysis and regression analysis in SPSS17.0.Finally,three major findings were generated.Firstly,there is a correlation between musical aptitude and receptive English phonological skills,and the musical aptitude has a direct influence on receptive English phonological skills.Secondly,musical aptitude has a high correlation with productive English p honological skills,and the musical aptitude also directly influences the productive English phonological skills.Thirdly,musical experiences not only present a high correlation with musical aptitude but also have a greatly positive influence on musical a ptitude.The study yielded two aspects of implication: theoretical implication and pedagogical implication.Theoretically,the study may contribute to complementing the individual differences for second language acquisition.Pedagogically,the study may draw parents' and schools' attention to English pronunciation education and music education.Furthermore,this study may provide a new idea for English pronunciation teaching that the teacher can improve students ' English phonological skills by virtue of music.