Acquisition Of English Plosives By Mandarin Primary School Students: A Survey Study

Plosives are the common consonants in all languages.English plosives are placed at the beginning part of the international phonetic alphabets(IPA),which demonstrates the important roles they play in English reading and speaking.Affected by their mother languages,Chinese second language learners may have difficulty in pronouncing English plosives.The L2 pronouncing problems such as,epenthesis,adding sounds at the end of English plosives and deletion,deleting plosive sounds in the middle of words,are quite serious.As the earliest phonetic segments which primary school students in Jiangsu Province expose to,it is quite significant to investigate primary school students' English plosives acquisition.This thesis reports a survey of the acquisition of English plosives by Mandarin primary school students(MPSSs)and two learner factors' influence on the acquisition of English plosives.Specifically,it attempts to explore the following research questions:1)To what extent do MPSSs produce English plosives correctly in citation form and connected speech?2)What are the plosives best and worst produced by MPSSs?And what are the typical errors in their production of English plosives?3)What are the acoustic features of English plosives produced by MPSSs?4)To what extent do gender and language proficiency correlate with MPSSs'production of English plosives?The subjects of the study are 124 Mandarin 6th-grade primary school students chosen from three natural classes of a public school in Jiangsu province.The instrument of the study is a reading material.The reading material is borrowed from previous study and rewritten for the present study,which consists of 6 English plosives in 21 phonetic contexts both in citation form and connected speech.The production data was collected in the recorded-broadcast classroom in the subjects' school and then analyzed acoustically with the help of the software Praat to rate the production of English plosives.The top 20 MPSSs' plosive production was selected to conclude the acoustic features of English plosives produced by them.The data about the influence of gender and language proficiency on the production of English plosives by MPSSs was collected through the subjects' school and then calculated by SPSS package.The results of the data analyses are as follows:1)Mandarin primary school students' overall correct production rate(CPR)of English plosives is just 68.16%in citation form and 67.15%in connected speech.The results indicate that MPSSs have difficulties in pronouncing English plosives correctly.The overall correct production rate in connected speech is a little bit lower than that in citation form.2)The plosive best produced in citation form is the segment/b/at the medial position(CPR= 97.58%).The worst plosive produced in citation form is/t/in consonant cluster(CPR=17.74%).With respect to English plosives in connected speech,/b/and/d/in the word-medial position,/g/in the word-initial position rank the best produced plosives(CPR=95.16%).Nevertheless,the worst produced plosive is/t/in the consonant cluster(CPR=12.90%).The most typical erroneous production of English plosives by MPSSs in both citation form and connected speech lies in the voiceless plosives following the sound/s/.Subjects tend to replace these unaspirated voiceless plosives with the aspirated voiced plosives.The other major production difficulty is the plosives in the word-final positions.L2 learners tend to pronounce those plosives with the epenthesis of the schwa sound or with audible release,which are not common in native speakers.3)The acoustic features of English plosives produced by MPSSs in,word-initial and word-medial positions show significant difference compared with RP speakers'.In terms of the voice onset time(VOT),/p/,/t/,/d/,/k/in word-initial positions(Sig =.025/.000/.031/.001),/p/,/b/,/d/,/k/in word-medial positions(Sig.=.003/.020/.002/.000)and/p/,/t/in consonant clusters(Sig.=.047/.007)show significant difference.In terms of duration of plosive articulation,/b/,/t/,/d/,/k/,/g/in word-initial positions(Sig =.001/.005/.007/.000/.003),/p/,/d/,/k/,/g/in word-medial positions(Sig =.000/.000/.006/.000)and/p/,/t/in consonant clusters(Sig.=.000/.000)show significant difference between two groups of subjects.When it comes to the duration of plosive closure phase,the investigation shows that/b/,/d/,/k/,/g/in word-initial positions(Sig.=.004/.015/.016/.003),/d/,/k/,/g/in word-medial positions(Sig.=.000/.020/.000)and/p/,/t/,/k/in consonant clusters(Sig.=.037/.000/.038)show significant difference between learners and native speakers.Nevertheless,no significant difference between MPSSs' production and RPSs' could be found in the closure phase duration of word-final positions.4)With respect to the influence of the two learner factors on the production of English plosives by MPSSs,both gender and language proficiency correlate with MPSSs' production of English plosives significantly(Sig =.017/.000).The result of the study calls for more studies or language instructors to employ relatively objective instruments to conduct the investigation on the phonetic learning for primary school students.More importantly,the data the study shows could,to some extent,reflect the phonetic teaching and learning problems in primary schools and draw researchers'and language teachers' attention to the phonetic teaching and learning in primary schools.