Analyses Of Productions Of English Monophthongs By Chinese Middle School Students

Foreign language learning plays a vital role in many spheres such as international communication and international business.Of all the foreign languages,English is currently the most powerful language for education,business and even politics.However,during the learning of English as a foreign language,people find it difficult to learn English pronunciation,and middle school students,for instance,are curious about how English monophthongs should be pronounced.This thesis investigates productions of monophthongs by Chinese middle school students,the overall intelligibility of their pronunciation,as well as differences in pronunciation between male and female students.In the experiment for this study,60 middle school students from Xuancheng middle school were recruited to participate in the experiment(30 male and 30 female students).They were asked to read eleven carrier sentences with target words included,aiming at Received Pronunciation.The data collected were analyzed through PRAAT,Excel and SPSS 21.0.Based on the collected data,this study shows that the average successful learning rate of participants is over 80%,which indicates that students can learn the pronunciation of English monophthongs satisfactorily.Male students and female students were analyzed separately.For the front vowels,male students tended to have a greater degree of openness and a lower tongue position when pronouncing/i:/,/e/,and/?/.For/i/,the openness degree is smaller and the tongue position is relatively higher.Male participants tended to have a forward tongue position when producing/?/and/?/and a back position for/e/.Female participants tended to have a more correct front-back tongue position for/i:/and correct tongue height for/?/.For the other front vowels,female students performed similar to males.For the central vowels,the performance of male students was not satisfactory.Male students tended to have too low and front tongue position for/(?)/and too back for the vowel/(?):/.Female participants showed a similar trend to that of male students but their performance was worse.For the back vowels,both male and female students could pronounce/(?)/well.Male students tended to lower their tongue position for back vowels,because the average F1 of/a:/,/(?)/,/?:/,/u:/were greater than the average F1 of male RP speakers.For the first three of these vowels,the male students had a too front tongue position and too back for/u:/.Female students had a too low tongue position when pronouncing the four back vowels.Besides the fact that tongue position of/u:/was too back,the three remaining vowels were too front.The experiment shows that Chinese middle school students had acquired English monophthongs fairly well but with some apparent deviation from those of native speakers.The detailed result map may provide empirical suggestions for English teaching.