Abstract
This paper investigates the influence of three factors on pronunciation accuracy of Chinese adult foreign language learners. Ten target sounds including phonemes and syllables are included in the pre-test, an analysis of which shows that the mispronunciation of the randomly chosen target sounds mainly results from L1 negative transfer. It is observed in intervention that some mispronounced target sounds are more difficult to be corrected than the others. However, the hierarchy of difficulty for pronunciation acquisition cannot be constructed without considering the impact of task variables, for even the same subject’s performance might vary in post-test including vocabulary reading, sentence reading and spontaneous speech, in which tasks individual aptitude in perception, mimicry and monitoring also has a role to play in the improvement of pronunciation accuracy.
Highlights
It is widely observed that foreign language learners might make different types of errors in their communication
In view of the tentative results of above researches, we intent to take a scrutiny at the experiment again to verify the following hypotheses: (1) Negative transfer accounts for the majority of pronunciation errors and there exists a hierarchy of difficulty in pronunciation acquisition for Chinese foreign language learners
Negative transfer constitutes the basis for the mispronunciation of language learners, which can be explained within an information-processing model as “a psycholinguistic procedure by means of which SL learners activate their native language (NL) knowledge in developing or using their IL (Hammarberg, 1997)
Summary
It is widely observed that foreign language learners might make different types of errors in their communication. Thompson (1991) observed the performance of thirty-six native speakers of Russian in sentence reading, prose reading and spontaneous speech and concluded that the tasks in which the participants were involved would have an effect on their performance in pronunciation accuracy, while Jilka et al (2007) and Haslam (2010) claim that that individual aptitude is a decisive factor in learning a foreign language sound system. In view of the tentative results of above researches, we intent to take a scrutiny at the experiment again to verify the following hypotheses: (1) Negative transfer (from the level of phoneme to syllable structure) accounts for the majority of pronunciation errors and there exists a hierarchy of difficulty in pronunciation acquisition for Chinese foreign language learners. Due to the limited empirical studies conducted in the field of pronunciation of Chinese adult English learners, it is hoped that the present study might offer more insights into factors that influence their IL pronunciation accuracy
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