Chinese EFL Students’ Errors of Consonant Acquisition

Xiaoyan RUAN

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.


Keywords


Errors of English consonant pronounciation; Tendencies of errors; Corpus; Chinese EFL learners

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References


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DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3968/j.css.1923669720130906.2926

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