Chinese EFL Students’ Errors of Consonant Acquisition.docVIP

Chinese EFL Students’ Errors of Consonant Acquisition Abstract This paper， based upon the Chinese Learner Spoken English Corpus， analyses Chinese college students’common pronouncition errors of English consonants. Statistic analysis indicated the following： （1） The most frequent pronounciation errors were lateral and fricatives；（2） Consonants in which errors occurred during the acquisition were generally of the same type as source consonants； （3） Some errors tended to appear at the specific locations of words， and their distributions in general had no obvious tendencies； （4） Gender differences had little effect upon Chinese EFL learners’ consonant pronounciation errors. The main reasons for the Chinese college students’ common pronounciation errors of English consonants might be due to the participants’negative transfer of L1 to L2， the overgeneralization of the target language and students’neglect of English pronounciation rules and regularities. Implications and suggestions are provided for the results. Key words： Errors of English consonant pronounciation； Tendencies of errors； Corpus； Chinese EFL learners INTRODUCTION In the past ten years， the focus in English language teaching in China has been shifted to listening and speaking， and remarkable progress has been made in pronounciation teaching as well as researches on phonetics （Cui， 2010； Li， 2011； Hu， 2013； Wang， 2010； Wu， 2012； Zhang， 2010）. At the initial stage， researchers simply compared and contrasted the similarites and differences between English and Chinese in terms of phonetic systems （Chen， 2010； Fa， 2011； Gao， 2002； Gao， 2011； Ma， 2004； Tian 2000）. In recent years， based upon distinct linguistic theories and various methods， they have been able to study the issues concerning English pronounciation at different levels （Cui， 2012； Mao， 2010； Pei， 2012； Pei Ding， 2013； Song， 2010； Zhang， 2010； Wu， 2012） and the various aspects of Chinese learners’pronounciation acquisition. Empirical and experimental