An Action Research On Teaching English Phonology In A Trilingual Environment

The foundation of any language is phonology.Phonology is the carrier of language learning.The National English Curriculum Standard for Compulsory Education also puts forward specific requirements for teaching phonology in junior high school English.Phonology is a more difficult part of English learning for Chinese students,especially for minority students.When learners learn another language,there is a transfer phenomenon between the native language and the newly learned language.This transfer can be both positive and negative,which can hinder students’ learning of the new language.The languages spoken in Inner Mongolia are mainly Mongolian and Chinese.The English classroom has a mixed use of "Mongolian-Chinese and English".The trilingualism will affect each other.Noticing,comparative analysis,and corrective feedback theory theories were used in the course of instructional action to address Mongolian students’ phonological difficulties.By conducting two rounds of action research and analyzing 92 seventh grade Mongolian students,the researcher aimed to address the following research questions:(1)What are the difficulties of Mongolian students’ English phonology learning in a trilingual environment?(2)What are the factors that affect students’ English phonology proficiency in a trilingual environment?(3)How to effectively promote Mongolian junior high school students’ English phonological learning in a trilingual environment? The instruments of this study were tests,questionnaires,and interviews.Some phonetic alphabets were measured by tests and interview to identify the phonology difficulties of Mongolian students.Two rounds of phonology instructional actions were carried out to address the students’ difficulties by combining comparative analysis,attention to hypotheses,corrective feedback,and the MOVIE phonics instructional model.The data were analyzed and the following findings were made: first,the main difficulties in Mongolian students’ English phonology were the phonetic alphabet [i:],[?u],[?:],[?i],[ai],[au],[r],[f],[v],[θ],[e].Second,the factor for Mongolian students’ difficulties in English phonology is the complex trilingual environment,pronunciations in Mongolian phonology that are similar to English phonology can interfere with Mongolian students and cause them to pronounce English phonology as Mongolian phonology.Chinese phonology creates unnecessary burden when Mongolian students learn English phonology,which hinders the learning of English phonology.Third,in the "Mongolian-English" bilingual environment,comparative analysis is used to compare and contrast the similarities and differences between Mongolian and English phonology in order to facilitate Mongolian students’ learning of English phonology.Noticing is used to draw the attention of Mongolian students to their habitual errors due to their native language and to arouse their interest in the process of relearning the errors.Corrective feedback was used to correct Mongolian students’ phonological errors in English.Through these methods,the Mongolian students’ English phonological proficiency was effectively improved.This study suggests corresponding pedagogical insights: teaching English phonology to Mongolian junior high school students should be done in an appropriate way to avoid boring teaching methods.