An Experimental Study On Chinese EFL Learners’ Acquisition Development Of English Vowels

Although there has been an increase in the number of studies on Chinese EFL learners’ English pronunciation acquisition in recent years,there have been fewer studies on Chinese EFL learners’ acquisition development of English vowel.This research is guided by the vowel pattern theory,this study explore Chinese EFL learners’ acquisition development of English vowel on acoustic experiments.Speech analysis software is used to extract data for the Formant 1（F1）and Formant 2（F2）of vowels.The above parameters are then used to generate acoustic vowel diagram and vowel V-value diagram,as well as accuracy and dispersion analyses.By contrasting the vowel patterns and analyzing the experimental data,this study tries to answer the following two questions:1)What are the characteristics of Chinese EFL learners’ acquisition development of English vowels?2)What are the influencing factors for Chinese EFL learners’ acquisition development of English vowels?This study discovers: 1)Chinese EFL learners are better at acquiring the similar vowel /i/and relatively poor at acquiring the blended vowels /u/ and /a/ in the elementary stage.Chinese EFL learners’ acquisition of the English vowel /i/ is more mature at the intermediate level,and their acquisition of the vowels /u/ and /a/ is better than at the elementary level.Learners are initially unable to assimilate to their native pronunciation categories,and they establish new phoneme categories at the advanced stage of learning and are not influenced by native language transfer when pronouncing the vowels /?/ and /з/.2)There are two major factors that influence Chinese EFL learners’ acquisition development of English vowels.First,native language transfer influences Chinese EFL learners’ acquisition development of English vowels.The similarity between the native language and English pronunciation leads to positive transfer for elementary and intermediate learners,while the difference between native and English pronunciation leads to negative transfer.For advanced learners,the opposite appears to be true,with similar pronunciation appearing to be more difficult to learn.Second,Chinese EFL learners’ acquisition development of English vowels has an interlanguage feature,which means that their pronunciation is somewhere between their native language and the target language in English.The findings of this paper support Selinker’s（1972）“Interlanguage Theory” which states that as learning progresses,the native language will approach the target language more and more.It also supports to Flege’s（1995）“Speech Learning Model” which states that similar pronunciation is more difficult to learn for advanced Chinese EFL learners.The findings of this study have positive implications for second language pronunciation instruction.