| Speaking standard English is almost every English learner’s destination,but the actual situation is often not quite satisfactory.In fact,English learners’ pronunciation problems,big or sma ll,will not only affect the smooth progress of the conversation but also seriously affect their future work.Therefore,it is of great importance to find out students’ pronunciation errors in the process of learning English and figure out the reasons affe cting these errors and put forward some appropriate teaching measures.Therefore,the research questions of this paper are: 1)What kinds of errors do the vocational college students make on the segmental level? 2)What kinds of errors do the vocational college students make on the supra-segmental level? 3)What are the possible reasons behind such phenomena?The author conducted the research based on a pronunciation test and a questionnaire.30 civil aviation sophomores of different genders were selected f rom Hunan Vocational College of Science and Technology.Firstly,all of the subjects were asked to take a pronunciation test to measure their English pronunciation ability on the segmental and supra-segmental levels,then the questionnaire was used to measure their motivation and attitude towards English pronunciation and some other factors that contributed to these pronunciation problems.On the segmental level,students’ pronunciation errors include substitution errors,adding errors and deletion errors.Substitution errors mainly occur between long vowels and short vowels,between consonant /f/ and /v/,/θ/ and /e/,and the replacement of /e?/ with /l/.Adding problems contain adding a vowel after a consonant and adding a consonant after a vowel.For deletion problems,subjects tend to read /r?u/ in word grow as /?u/ or /ru/.On the supra-segmental level,subjects can hardly find the correct stress position in polysyllabic words;when single words are put together to form sentences,participants almost always stress every single word.In addition,they tend to use fall tones in all sentences.The findings of the questionnaire show that participants have strong motivations and positive attitudes towards English pronunciation.As for reasons affecting their English pronunciation ability,they are the negative transfer of mother tongue,lack of professional phonetic instruction and outdated school teaching equipment.Based on the above findings and one-year teaching experience in this vocational college,the author put forward some suggestions to improve teachers’ phonetic teaching ability and students’ phonetic learning ability. |
