A Survey On The Current Situation Of The Mastery And Application Of English Phonetic Symbols For Junior High School Students

Pronunciation is an indispensable part of the language knowledge that students must master,and is the key part of English learning.And phonetic symbol is the key part of pronunciation learning.Only when the phonetic symbol is mastered,can students learn pronunciation and English more easily and efficiently.The purpose of this thesis is to investigate the mastery and application of phonetic symbols for the seventh to ninth grade students in a township middle school,in order to know the current situation of students’ mastery and application of the phonetic symbols,finding out the existing differences in the mastery of the phonetic symbols for students in different grades and different English levels.Through the analysis and reflection of the current situation and existing problems,the author comes up with some corresponding suggestions,providing references for English phonetic symbols teaching.The research questions are listed as follows:(1)What is the current situation of the mastery,application and attitude of English phonetic symbols for junior high school students?(2)What is the situation of teacher’s phonetic symbols teaching?(3)What are the differences between students of different grades in the mastery of English phonetic symbols?(4)What are the differences between students with good English scores and students with poor scores in the mastery of phonetic symbols?The author takes 159 students and 5 English teachers at Quanzhang Middle School in Xinjiang County,Yuncheng City as research subjects and adopts questionnaire,teat and interview to investigate the current situation of mastery and application of phonetic symbols for junior high school students.What’s more,this thesis adopts a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods to analyze the data and information collected.Through this research,the results are as follows:Firstly,most students have a positive attitude towards the phonetic symbols,and can realize the importance of the phonetic symbols,and also are interested in learning the phonetic symbols.However,the mastery and application of the phonetic symbols of students are at a medium level.They can not accurately read 48 phonetic symbols,can not learn and remember words based on phonetic symbol,and they are less likely to divide syllables and read stress in words.In addition,students’ learning strategies for phonetic symbols are relatively monotonous,and they only study phonetic symbols through the way of “teachers reading,students following”.Secondly,most teachers think that phonetic symbols teaching in the seventh grade is very important.But there are some problems among them,for example,some teachers have a solid knowledge of English phonetic symbols,while some teachers have not.And most teachers take a little time to teach the phonetic symbols.In addition to this,some teachers don’t assign homework of phonetic symbols learning to students or check the effect of students’ phonetic symbols learning.Thirdly,seventh-graders prefer to learn phonetic symbols and do the best job in reading48 phonetic symbols than the higher grades,while ninth graders perform the worst.There are not significant differences in performance between the three grades in other aspects.Fourthly,students with good scores in English prefer to learn phonetic symbols,and do better in the mastery and application of phonetic symbols as well as the application of meta-cognitive and cognitive strategy than students with poor English scores.