An Applied Research On Pronunciation Teaching With The Assistance Of English Fun Dubbing APP At Elementary School

Accuracy of pronunciation is a key factor affecting the effect of oral communication.Standard of English Curriculum in Compulsory Education(2011)puts forward specific requirements for pronunciation teaching in primary school in both segmental and suprasegmental aspects.This study focuses on the effect of pronunciation teaching with the assistance of English Fun Dubbing,a mobile app for English education,in elementary school.Through a 12-week teaching experiment implemented in a control and experimental class of third grade elementary school students,this study investigates the effect of the English Fun Dubbing app on elementary school students’ interest in learning English pronunciation and the specific effects on improving students’ pronunciation proficiency in segmental and suprasegmental phonemes(including stress,liaison and intonation).With the help of pre-test and post-test on pronunciation,pre-experiment questionnaire and post-experiment questionnaire,an interview and other assisting tools like Cool Edit 2.0 and SPSS 19,the author analyzed both the pronunciation proficiency and students’ interest towards pronunciation learning before and after the EFD-assisted pronunciation teaching.The conclusion of the paper is the problems of English phonological learning for elementary school students were(1)confusing the pronunciation of similar vowels and consonants;(2)replacing English pronunciation with Chinese pronunciation;and(3)lacking knowledge of stress,liaison,and intonation.After the teaching experiment,elementary school students’ interest in pronunciation learning increased significantly in three aspects:functional cognition,learning willingness and self-evaluation.Students rated the app highly in terms of functional cognition,devotion,and learning autonomy,mainly because(1)multimedia materials stimulate learning interest;(2)short videos that serve the purpose of pronunciation make learning easier and more efficient.Students can concentrate and immerse themselves in the English environment in a short period of time;(3)dubbing activities are entertaining and provide good motivation for learning pronunciation.