An Analysis Of English Phonetic Errors Made By Cantonese Speaking English Majors

Accurate English pronunciation is of great importance for the English majors,especially for those teacher-oriented majors,because most of them would serve as teachers and their accuracy of pronunciation would have a great effect on their students’ articulation.As the characteristics of local normal university,to study on the accuracy of English speech sounds of their students would provide a great implication on the local English pronunciation teaching.The previous six years’ study on English phonetic errors at home mainly focus on the phonetic errors of freshmen.While according to the teaching practice of the author,it is found that the English sophomores still have lots of phonetic errors which would hamper the intelligibility in the communication,especially for the students whose mother tongue is Cantonese.Thus this research takes forty-four Cantonese speaking sophomores of Guagnxi Teachers’ Education University as subjects to study on their English phonetic errors.These subjects have taken MyET(My English Tutor)English Reading Aloud Contest for nine weeks.The objective of the contest is to improve students’ pronunciation accuracy by practicing the texts including the phonemes which hamper intelligibility.This research takes subjects’ recording samples of post-test to answer the following questions:(1)Whether the subjects still make phonetic errors in the post-test after a nine weeks’ practicing or not?(2)If there are some phonetic errors,then what types and subcategories of these phonetic errors will belong to?(3)What are the reasons that cause these phonetic errors? Based on error analysis theory,the researcher picks up the phonetic errors in the recording samples and classifies them into different groups.In the process of finding out the reasons that cause these phonetic errors,the researcher designs a questionnaire and a test.The former aims to find out the length of English listening and speaking of subjects,and the latter aims to know about subjects’ knowledge of the manner and place of English speech sounds.In the end of the research,it finds out that there are mainly four types of phonetic errors made by subjects: substitution errors,addition errors,deletion errors and stress errors,among which substitution errors take up the highest frequency.Besides the negative transfer of Cantonese,the reasons that cause these phoneticerrors including the time of English listening and speaking and the mastery of the knowledge of English speech sounds.The results of this research have practical and theoretical meanings.Theoretically,it makes contribution to similar studies of English phonetic errors.Practically,it is helpful for both English pronunciation teaching and students’ phonetic self-practicing.