Under the background of the globalization of the world economy, English is no longer the patent of native speakers. As an international language, it is a way and means to understand, communicate and express different cultures. The following are academic papers on foreign languages. Welcome to read them.
English accents of people with different mother tongue backgrounds may cause communication interruption or even failure; English accent is closely related to the identity and self of the speaker. China has the largest number of English learners in the world. With the increasing political and economic strength of China and the frequent international exchanges, it is of great theoretical value and practical significance to study China's English accent. The concept of "China English" was put forward by Ge Chuanjun, a China scholar, in the 1980s. It is defined as "English with China characteristics, which is based on standard English and used in China". Since then, many scholars have had heated theoretical discussions and debates on the definition of "China English". At present, scholars have basically reached an understanding of the objective existence of China English, emphasizing that the characteristics of China English should be described from the aspects of phonetics, vocabulary, syntax and discourse, so as to show the whole picture of China English. The concept of "China English accent" has never appeared in domestic literature. On the basis of previous definitions, we call it "English accent with China language characteristics"
From 2000 to 20 13, we consulted the articles published in the foreign language core journals of China Social Science Index (CSSCI) 14, and sorted out the related literatures of the above journals. Firstly, the articles on "China English" and "English Pronunciation of English Learners in China" are classified, with 58 related literatures (as shown in table 1). On the whole, there are *** 15 papers on English in China, accounting for 25.9%, while there are ***43 papers on English phonetics of Chinese college students, accounting for 74. 1 9/6. Secondly, according to the research methods, the relevant articles are divided into empirical research and non-empirical research, accounting for 62. 19/6 and 37.9% respectively. Non-empirical research mainly includes the introduction of world English theory and English international language theory, the summary of China's English research and the discussion of language transfer, English-Chinese contrast, interlanguage and phonetics (Optimality Theory). ). The empirical research mainly includes the characteristics of China's English accent (segmental phonemes and suprasegmental phonemes), the characteristics of China's English sub-variant accent, the construction of relevant corpus and the attitude towards China's English accent. Limited by space, we only classify and comment on the empirical research results of China's English accent from the above five aspects.
First, several key issues in the study of English accent
(A) the study of the phonological characteristics of intervals
Domestic scholars believe that the empirical study of China's English accent began in the 1990s. From 65438 to 0994, Professor Le Meiyun of Nanjing University conducted a comprehensive investigation and analysis of English pronunciation learning of middle school students in major dialect areas in China for the first time, and collected corpus from all over the country. From the perspective of phonetic errors, this paper discusses the influence of dialects on English phonemic pronunciation, and finds out the difficulties and basic rules of English phonetic learning for students in major dialect areas. We believe that some middle school students' pronunciation problems can be solved through English teaching, while foreign scholars' research on the world's variant English accents is based on the educated (usually college students). Therefore, we only selected the empirical research literature with China college students as the research object. In empirical research, scholars usually find out the problems existing in English phonetics of college students in China from the perspective of English-Chinese contrast and according to the theory of language transfer or interlanguage, and make suggestions on English phonetics teaching through the research methods of experimental phonetics.
1. Vowel features. Vowel is a difficult point in English pronunciation teaching. Based on learners' corpus, two empirical studies on the characteristics of vowel pronunciation summarized the main problems existing in English vowel pronunciation of college students in China, such as the length and quality of vowels and the simplification of diphthongs. Chen Hua used the method of experimental phonetics to investigate the corpus of China learners' deep spoken English. ) 14 an analysis of four years' reading recording of English majors. It is found that the standard pronunciation of vowel /I//e/ is quite different from that of diphthongs /eI//au//aI/. Cheng's analysis of the corpus of segmental errors of advanced English learners in China shows that the error rate of /i/e/a/ is very high, accounting for 53.9% of the total vowel errors. The errors of eight loose vowels /i//e//a//u/ account for 73.5% of the total errors. /i/ and /I/ are the most common errors in replacement segments.
2. Consonant features. Five empirical research results of consonant pronunciation characteristics. Among them, Cheng summed up the whole problem of consonant pronunciation of college students in China by systematically analyzing the corpus of segmental errors of advanced English learners in China. She found that the error rate of consonants is /t//d//z//6//n//l//v/. Among the substitution errors, the fricative sound /6//z//v/ is the most common. Students tend to use /d/ instead of /6/, /s/ instead of /z/ and /w/ instead of /v/. Among the shedding errors, sonic boom /t//d//k/ is the most common one. Four scholars have made empirical studies on consonant group, consonant swallowing, affricate and affricate respectively. By analyzing the reading recordings of six freshmen, Yan Lili and others found that the misperception of consonants is the most common, followed by deletion and replacement. She further explained the acquisition of English consonants by English learners in China under the framework of Optimality Theory. Feng You found that the most common consonant swallowing sounds of learners are dental sound, soft palate sound and double lip sound in pronunciation order. According to the pronunciation, it is sonic boom, fricative and nasal; Vocal consonant swallowing: cases are far more than voiced consonants. The position where consonant swallowing is most likely to occur is suffix, and the position where consonant swallowing is least likely to occur is prefix. Chen Hua. This paper studies some problems existing in fricative and affricate of English learners in China, such as /6/ fa cheng /d/ or /z/, /v//w/ confusion, and uses /x/ instead of /s/. Wang Maolin used the method of experimental phonetics to make a comparative analysis of the duration of stops in the vocabulary of English learners in the United States and China. It is found that China learners' English voiced sounds are relatively good, while their voiced sounds are relatively poor. In a word, the main pronunciation problems of China students in English consonants are the confusion between voiced consonants and unvoiced consonants, the misreading of /l//n/, th sounds, /w//v/, and the swallowing of consonants. (B) Study on the characteristics of supraphonemes
Scholars generally believe that foreign accents or foreign accents are closely related to the characteristics of suprasegmental phonemes. Therefore, the characteristics of China's English accent are more reflected in the suprasegmental phoneme level. Yang Jun and others found inappropriate foreign accents and rhythms (such as improper stress, improper rhythm, improper division of sound groups, improper use of boundary sounds, improper syllable duration, etc.) through combing the related literature on reading aloud. ) are two major research topics. Chen Hua demonstrated that the suprasegmental phoneme errors of English learners in China are more serious than segmental phoneme errors, and the teaching of suprasegmental phoneme features should occupy an important position in college English. Here, it is mainly summarized from four aspects: word stress, sentence stress and rhythm, pause and intonation.
1. Word stress. Word stress is an important phonetic feature of English. There is only 1 in the existing literature on the empirical study of word stress pronunciation of college students in China. Gao Lin and others analyzed the word stress errors in the recorded reading samples of non-English majors and the spoken English corpus of China learners, and found that the stress shift of polysyllabic words is common, and the second syllable stress of words (especially nouns and adjectives) tends to be dislocated.
2. Sentence stress and rhythm. Rhythm plays a very important role in the understanding of pronunciation. There are four empirical studies on sentence stress and rhythm, mainly from Professor Chen Hua of Nanjing University. Chen Hua made an analysis of 45 English learners' oral reading in China, taking 8 British college students' nuclear adjustment positions as the reference standard. The results show that the proportion of learners who focus on contrasting stress and emphasizing stress is small, and there are many inappropriate nuclear words. They often emphasize functional words, such as prepositions, personal pronouns and conjunctions. Chen Hua's four-year longitudinal study of English learners in China shows that students' stress problems are on the rise to some extent, and the rhythm pattern reflected by the stress pattern has not changed significantly. The difference between stressed syllables and weak syllables in oral English of students with low scores is obviously heavier than that of students with high scores. Xu Jun and others comparatively analyzed the prosodic features of English learners in China and native speakers through PRRAT software, and found that English learners in China lacked vowel weakening and ellipsis, which made syllable rhythm more practical than accent rhythm. Moreover, there are often mistakes in the use of stress, and the expression of stress is limited to increasing loudness. In short, scholars have come to a consistent conclusion from a large number of empirical studies: China college students have problems in sentence stress and rhythm, they have not mastered the basic stress laws of real word stress and weak reading of function words, and their spoken language has the rhythm characteristics of a typical "syllable-beat language", which is very different from English rhythm.
Time out. Pause is very important for the fluency of oral expression, but the excessive use of pause by English learners in China leads to the destruction of information, which affects the transmission of information and greatly reduces the fluency and understandability of oral expression. Four articles in the existing literature were suspended. Chen Hua. It is found that English learners in China have more pauses in reading than native speakers, and there are more mistakes in pause positions. Comments from English phonetics experts show that learners rely too much on pauses to achieve intonation segmentation. For example, there are too many word intervals, fluency is impaired, language flow is interrupted, language flow is intermittent, sentence breaks are sometimes unnatural and so on. After analyzing the English reading of 65,438+05 college students, Yang Jun distinguished two types of intonation phrases in second language reading: the lack of intonation phrase markers and the failure of intonation phrase division. They are interrelated and influenced by speech style and online output management. Speech speed and other factors, such as task conditions, second language proficiency and tension, have no significant influence on the classification of intonation phrases. Yang Meng and others analyzed the pauses in 30 college students' impromptu utterances and their reflections on the causes of pauses, and found that they showed high-frequency internal pauses in intonation phrases, which was significantly related to oral fluency. The pause position is concentrated before the notional word and after the first word; Pause modes mainly include non-fluent string, non-filled pause and non-word filled item. Xu Jun and others found that English learners in China usually have a lot of silent pauses and filled pauses in a complete semantic unit, and their English sounds fragmented and incoherent.
4. intonation. Many scholars have provided empirical data for the study of English pronunciation and intonation characteristics of Chinese college students, and there are 9 related studies. Tian analyzed the reasons for China English learners' misuse of nuclear adjustment and the misinformation caused by it, and divided it into three categories: mistakes in the division of nuclear adjustment groups, mistakes in the position of nuclear adjustment and misuse of modal adjustment. According to Yang Jun's research, Chinese college students lack the use of continuous rising tone, which is manifested in the fact that the pitch is not high enough, or the pitch is not obvious, or both, with obvious "foreign accent". According to Chen Hua's research, English learners in China have a good command of falling tone and rising tone, but they show the characteristics of overusing falling tone. Secondly, there are some differences between learners and native speakers in basic modes, mainly in the use of flat tones. In addition, learners can't choose the corresponding secondary mode according to their emotions and attitudes, and the mode is confused. Hu et al. studied the intonation change trend of English majors in four years' oral reading, and found that the intonation change trend showed a negative growth curve, and the falling tone was used more. Xu Jun and other researchers found that English learners in China made many mistakes in dealing with the boundary sound of pitch stress and ending intonation, and the excessive use of falling tone led to flat intonation and lack of change.
Two scholars made an empirical study on the use of boundary sounds by college students in China. Zhihua Xia collected natural language materials and analyzed them with the help of discourse analysis software. It is found that China students use all kinds of boundary sounds in turn-taking, but their ability to use boundary sounds to indicate the speaker's intention to change turns is far less than that of native English speakers, especially the misuse of low-level boundary sounds. The research results of Meng et al. show that, except for short imperative sentences, English learners in China are significantly different from native speakers in reading the boundary sounds at the end of other six sentences, such as declarative sentences, exclamatory sentences, general questions and special questions, but they have a good grasp of the boundary sounds at the beginning of sentences.
Two scholars studied the influence of gender differences on intonation acquisition. Lin Qiuming investigated the relationship between stress rhythm and intonation of first-year English majors and their gender, and found that women's prosodic performance was only slightly dominant. Except for stress, there is no significant difference between boys and girls in the frequency of using inter-group sounds and disyllabic sounds. With the help of phonetic experiment, Jiang studied the application mode of English intonation of English majors in China. The results show that there are significant differences between male and female subjects in the pitch of nuclear adjustment; However, in the use of English intonation, the subjects showed a high degree of consistency. There is no significant difference between the sexes in the choice of intonation patterns.
Generally speaking, learners do not realize the importance of intonation in information transmission, do not fully grasp the communicative function of intonation, and intonation misuse is common. The use of flat falling tone is excessive, and the performance of continuous use of rising and falling tone is relatively lacking; Compared with the boundary sound at the beginning of a sentence, the boundary sound at the end of the sentence is not well grasped. In addition, there is no obvious gender difference in intonation.
(c) study the p sound of various variants.
The Atlas of Chinese Language divides Chinese into ten dialects, namely Northern Dialect, Wu Dialect, Xiang Dialect, Gan Dialect, Hakka Dialect, Cantonese Dialect, Min Dialect, Jin Dialect, Pinghua Dialect and Hui Dialect. Two scholars have studied the phonological problems of students in various dialect areas in China. Scholars have tried the negative transfer of English pronunciation from dialects in different regions, and made ***6 empirical research results. Liu Jinming studied the pronunciations of /l/ and /r/ of English majors in northern dialect areas, Wu dialect areas and Min dialect areas. Through acoustic analysis, Jiang Yuyu made a comparative analysis of five similar vowels /a//i//u//e//0/ in Minnan dialect and Wu dialect with American vowel system. Because the acoustic characteristics of similar vowels in the two dialects are very close, it is found that it is difficult for students in both places to acquire the target pronunciation accurately. Four scholars have analyzed the English pronunciation of students from different provinces and cities in China. For example, Wang Lunan focused on the phenomenon of Sichuan and Guizhou students /l//n/ regardless, /η//n/ regardless and its reasons. Liu Feng et al. investigated the effect of practice frequency on pronunciation correction of two Sichuan subjects /I//n/. The follow-up test results of 1 year show that the frequency effect has obviously improved the pronunciation correction of the subjects /l//n/. Xie Mi studied the effect and influence of frequency on speech error correction in /v//W/ min through high-frequency practice, high-density observation and high-precision analysis. Based on Optimality Theory and Perceptual Graph Theory, Ye Fan analyzed the stress phenomenon of students whose mother tongue is Beijing dialect when pronouncing English vowel ending consonants, and found that some students eliminated or simplified vowel ending consonants by inserting vowels, deleting consonants or changing the original consonants into vowels. In addition, /v//w/ is also common among English learners in China (for example, students in Shandong and Zhejiang have similar problems). In a word, there are great differences among the major dialects in China. In addition to the * * * features of China English accent, the sub-variant accents of each dialect have their own unique phonetic features.
(d) Research on related corpora.
There are five corpora related to the study of college students' English phonetics in China. The Learners' Spoken English Corpus established by Professor Wei Naixing in 2003 provides a scientific platform for the study of second language phonetics for the first time. This corpus is based on the real audio-visual materials of the oral part of the National College English Test. Through random proportional sampling, the geographical origin, professional test scores and conversation topics of candidates are selected proportionally, and a series of symbols such as turn-taking, pronunciation, intonation, pause, hesitation, interruption and nonverbal communication in XML language are marked one by one. Then, in 2005, Professor Wen presided over the establishment of China Learners' Spoken and Written Language Corpus based on the National Oral English Test for English Majors. This corpus not only provides the complete text of the recording, but also divides the corpus of each year according to the task type (repetition, solitude, conversation). In addition, the literature also involves the China Subcorpus of the International Spoken English Learner Corpus established by Professor He Anping of South China Normal University and the LSECCI of the China English Learner Deep Spoken Corpus. (longitudinal spokeneng-iish China Learner Corpus) and so on.
(5) Attitude towards English accent.
Although there are two empirical research papers on China's attitude towards English accent, it is gratifying that they are both studied from the perspective of world English theory. Zhou Rong and others investigated the attitudes and recognition of English majors 1, 0 1 towards British English and American English by means of phonetic variation experiment, and tested their actual English accent characteristics by means of actual English accent test. The results show that the subjects' evaluation of American English is better than that of British English in three dimensions: power status, language affinity and language expression, showing a tendency to prefer American English. But their actual English accent is a mixture of two-thirds RP and one-third GA, which shows more characteristics of British accent. By combining quantitative and qualitative research methods, the senior students investigated the attitude and multicultural awareness of China university students' Olympic volunteers towards the world English varieties before and during the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games. The results show that the language attitude of Olympic volunteers tends to be conservative as a whole, they agree with the "standard variants" of Britain and the United States, have limited ability to identify other English variants, and are ambivalent about China's English accent.
Second, research summary: multi-perspective evaluation
The review of the above-mentioned documents proves that although the research results of China's English accent have accumulated to some extent, from the current research situation, the relevant research needs to be further improved, both in terms of the number of published papers and the depth and breadth of the research. We will summarize the research deficiencies from four aspects: research content, research methods, research perspective and application of research results, and further put forward the research prospects.
(1) enriches the research content and forms a systematic conclusion on the stress characteristics of China English sub-variants.
Judging from the research content, the research on the overall characteristics of China's English accent has been relatively mature, and scholars have formed systematic research conclusions on vowels, consonants, stress, sentence stress and rhythm, pause, intonation and other characteristics. However, China has a vast territory and rich dialects. In contrast, there is a serious shortage of research on English sub-variant accents in China. In the study of China English sub-variant accent among the top ten dialects in China, the most mature one is the study of Cantonese English accent. Foreign scholars have made a comprehensive and systematic description of the English accent in Hong Kong. For example, Huang system describes the phonetic features of Hong Kong English, pointing out that it has 8 vowels and 20 consonants. Burton described the characteristics of phonemes and supraphonemes in Hong Kong English, pointing out that Hong Kong English mostly uses high notes, and the contrast between strong and weak accents is not obvious. Followed by Professor Chen Hua and his team's research on Hunan dialect English accent and Wu dialect English accent. However, empirical studies on English accents of other seven dialects (Northern Dialect, Hakka Dialect, Min Dialect, Gan Dialect, Pinghua Dialect, Jin Dialect and Hui Dialect) are rare in the literature. In addition, under the English sub-variant accent of China, we can further study the characteristics of English sub-variant accents in various provinces and cities, such as the study of English accents in Sichuan, Guizhou and Beijing in the literature. In short, we call for more empirical research, so as to form a systematic research conclusion on China's English sub-variant stress and China's English sub-variant stress from phonemes and phonemes, and compare them with China's English stress to analyze their individuality and characteristics.
Updating research methods and establishing China English accent corpus.
From the perspective of research methods, the vigorous development of corpus provides convenience for the in-depth and systematic study of China's English accent. At present, most of the related corpora established in China are spoken corpora of English learners (such as COLSEC and SWECCLE). ), but the corpus construction of China English accent is relatively lacking. Nowadays, the international academic community has established the corpus of English varieties in various countries, and relevant experts and scholars have also put forward the idea of establishing the English corpus in China. Chen Hua also introduced the reasons, methods and significance of the construction of English pronunciation corpus for learners in China. This corpus covers ten dialect areas in China, with four different educational groups (junior high school, senior high school, English major undergraduate and English major master) as recording objects, and reading aloud and autonomous dialogue as tasks. The phonetic corpus will be combined with the British and American marking system to mark learners' recordings with multi-layer segments and rhythms. We look forward to the publication of this corpus, so as to systematically describe the * * * features, sub-variant accents and sub-variant accents of China's English accent, and draw systematic research conclusions by combining the research methods of experimental phonetics. In addition, the future construction of China English accent corpus can be further combined with the construction of international corpora with English as the lingua franca, such as the Vienna Oxford English International Corpus. ELFA Academic Background English is regarded as the common English corpus and Southeast Asian English corpus in academic environment. Only in this way can we promote the healthy development of English accent research in China and have a dialogue with international academic circles. (3) Broaden the research perspective and put the study of China's English accent in the context of globalization.
From the literature review in table 1, we can easily find that: from the research point of view, there are 34 empirical studies (accounting for 58.5%), most of which explain the pronunciation characteristics of China students' English from the perspective of language transfer theory and phonetics theory; Or through the research method of experimental phonetics, taking native speakers as reference, find out the crux of the phonetic problems of English learners in China. However, from the perspective of world English theory or English as an international language theory, there are only two studies on China's attitude towards English accent (3.4%). However, foreign scholars pay more attention to the attitude and understandability of China's English accent. For example, Jenkins took 326 educated people from 12 countries around the world as the research object, and made a comparative study on the attitudes of 10 world English accents. The results show that China ranks eighth in English accent accuracy, seventh in acceptability, eighth in comfort and fourth in familiarity. In the study of the comprehensibility of China's English accent, kirkpatrick chose the conversation between English majors of Hong Kong Institute of Education and professors of British expatriates as the corpus, and college students from Singapore and Australia as the audience. The results show that Hong Kong English accent is highly understandable and acceptable in the world, and it is suggested that it should be used as the teaching mode of pronunciation class. We call on domestic scholars to conduct more empirical research on the attitude and understandability of English variant accents from the perspective of world English and English as an international language. For example, what is the accent attitude of English learners in China towards different English varieties? How do they feel about their China English accent? What is the international comprehensibility and acceptability of China's English accent? What are the important features of phonemes and supraphonemes of China English accent that affect international intelligibility? What is the comprehensibility of China English sub-variant accent? In a word, future research can be conducted from the theoretical perspective of World English or English as an international language. How to put the study of China's English accent under the background of globalization, and how to compare and analyze the research results with those of Asian English accents and the phonetic characteristics of English as a lingua franca are all issues worthy of in-depth study.
(D) Applying the research results to optimize the teaching effect of English phonetics in China.
Judging from the application of the research results, the empirical research results of China's English accent are lacking in many aspects, such as optimizing the teaching effect of English pronunciation in China, formulating the English pronunciation teaching syllabus, developing and compiling English pronunciation textbooks and so on. Traditional English phonetics textbooks aim at accents close to native speakers (standard British English accent and American English accent), and the teaching content involves all phonemes and phoneme features. English pronunciation teaching under the background of English as an international language should aim at international intelligibility, expose students to various world English accents, improve their tolerance for different English accents, and enhance their confidence in China English accent. Jenkins collected a large number of corpora of English as a lingua franca, investigated the English communication between people with different mother tongue backgrounds, and put forward the core of lingua franca on the basis of empirical research. In her view, the core part that affects international intelligibility is mainly manifested in the simplification of most consonants and consonant groups, the distinction of vowel length and sentence stress. The part outside the core of lingua franca is considered as a local accent and cannot be called a phonetic error. Walker also pointed out in his monograph English Teaching as a Common Language that only by taking English as an international language teaching method can the two contradictory goals of understandability and identity be harmonized. Therefore, in phonetic teaching, teachers should fully understand the characteristics of China's English accent and the individual characteristics of English sub-variant accents in various dialect areas, and focus on the phonetic features that affect intelligibility; For the part of China's English accent that doesn't affect intelligibility, we don't need to demand its accuracy too much, so as to have a clear aim in pronunciation teaching and improve its effectiveness in international oral communication.
The continuous internationalization and localization of English has caused more and more discussions around the world. English scholar Graddol predicted in his book Where English Will Go: Asia, especially Indian and China, may determine the future of global English. Undoubtedly, the study of China English with Chinese etiquette and cultural characteristics will have far-reaching practical and long-term historical significance. 20 1 1 The 4th International Conference on English as a Common Language was held in the School of International Education of the University of Hong Kong in May; 20 12 18 International Conference on World English was held in City University of Hong Kong and Sun Yat-sen University. 20 12, International Symposium on the World English Age and China Practice was held in Huzhou Normal University. These important academic activities mark a new development period for English studies in China. Although the study of English accent in China started late, as a native speaker of Chinese, domestic scholars have incomparable advantages in this respect. We have reason to believe that with the deepening of China's opening to the outside world, the further development of China's economy, and the continuous improvement of China's position in international affairs, China's English will further improve its position in the world English family, and China's English accent will gradually become an important topic in the field of English teaching and research in the world.
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