An Empirical Study Of Senior High School Students’ English Phonetic Errors From The Perspective Of Interlanguage Theory

In recent years,compared with other English skills,English phonetic ability of Chinese students is still at a relatively low level.In our country’s phonetic teaching,contrastive analysis is still the mainstream of phonetic error analysis,that is,the main cause of phonetic errors attribute to the negative transfer of mother tongue.However,from the perspective of interlanguage theory,error analysis provides a new theoretical framework and method for the cognition of phonetic errors in English phonetic teaching.This thesis attempts to study the common errors in senior high school students’ English pronunciation under the framework of interlanguage theory to figure out the percentage,changing trends and the possible causes of those errors,and finally try to put forward corresponding improvement measures.In the study,50 students from two classes of a senior high school in Shenyang were selected as the participants.Before the beginning of the study,a questionnaire was used to investigate the basic situation of English learning of the 50 students.Subsequently,the subjects took an English phonetic test every 45 days for three months.All the recording samples were analyzed by Praat software to get the distribution of stress,and then the error rate of each specific point was counted through careful sound discrimination process.This thesis not only analyzes the overall performance distribution of the subjects,but also makes a comparison of the data,finds out 10 subjects who have made the greatest improvement in the study,and conducts interviews to explore the reasons for their progress.-Through the above research process,this study draws the following conclusions:the overall English phonetic ability of the senior high school students is low,with a high “failed” rate and a very low “excellent” rate.The senior high school students’ basic phonetic knowledge is relatively weak,and there are obvious weak points in the long and short vowels discrimination and the following phonetic symbols: /v/,/θ/,/e/,/l/,/n/,/?/,/ei/.The students have a weak awareness of sentence linking,intonation and sentence stress.Therefore,they cannot grasp the pronunciation characteristics of English sentences.The students almost do not have the knowledge of phonetic change and can hardly master the phonetic change phenomenon in English.In addition,in the three-month study,from a macro perspective,the overall error rate of the subjects continued to decline slightly.Besides,the overall error rate of the subjects in the word aspect and sentence aspect continued to decline,but the change of phonetic change aspect was not obvious.From a micro perspective,the error rate of the subjects in the basic phonetic symbols,word stress,sentence stress continued to decline,but the error rate of sentence linking and intonation increased slightly,while the error rate of assimilation and incomplete explosion changed little and fluctuated.On the whole,there is still a great space for improvement in English pronunciation among the tested high school students,and high school English teachers still have a long way to go.On the basis of the above conclusions,this thesis also draws the following possible causes of phonetic errors under the guidance of Interlanguage Theory: lack of phonetic knowledge,negative transfer of mother tongue,learners’ overconfidence and lack of motivation,and learners’ simplification and fossilization.In addition,under-the guidance of error analysis,this thesis also gives some suggestions for improvement,in order to provide more basis and inspiration for senior high school pronunciation teaching.