Analysis of the Production of Word-final Pronunciation by First-year English Majors A Case Study of a University in Chongqing, China

Abstract

The thesis aims to study the production of the word-final pronunciation made by Chinese foreign language learners, taking the freshmen majoring in English in a university in Chongqing as samples. Based on the theory of language transfer, the author studies the word-final pronunciations including three vowels (/e?/, /?/, / ?/) and six consonants (/t/, /s/, /d/, /n/, /m/, / ?/) pronounced by 231 freshmen majoring in English of a university in Chongqing and compares them with RP (Received Pronunciation) to calculate the accuracy of every phonetic symbols. Through the analysis on the accuracies, the author finds that most subjects can pronounce correctly the 20 selective words. But no word achieves 100% accuracy and most subjects make mistakes on the words ending with /?/ and /m/. After analyzing the errors, the author classifies the them into three categories: deletion, epenthesis and substitution. Based on the findings, the author concludes the main causes of the problems and gives some suggestions to solve them, which to some extent can be helpful for Chinese phonetics researches and China’s English teaching.