Strengths And Weaknesses Of Phonetics Teaching In China

This section discusses the weakness and the strengths of English phonetics instruction learning in China. First, since little attention was given to the English phonetic lesson in China, the researchers believe that majority of the students were not able to pronounce the English words correctly and accurately. This statement was proven through the finding of this study where majority of the respondents claimed that they were poor in the pronunciation of English words and not satisfied with it. Moreover, although English phonetics classes has long been implemented in China, the students would still pronounce the words incorrectly. According to Derwing and Munro (2005, p. 388) “Just as students learning certain grammar points benefit from being explicitly instructed to notice the difference between their productions and those of L1 speakers, so students learning L2 pronunciation benefit from being explicitly taught phonological form to help them notice the difference”. This explains through the recommendations by the researchers where the teacher should focus more on the teaching of English phonetics instruction in class and increase their teaching quality in that subject matter. Through this recommendation, it is hoped that the respondents’ view of the English phonetics lesson that was provided by their universities which they said that are not useful, can change and can give lots

Jenkins (2002) emphasizes that effective communicative pronunciation competence can be achieved more through improving supra-segmental production in preference to segmentals. Thus, suprasegmentals features should be focus more in teaching phonetics. For instance, the intonation, stress of the words and stress of the sentences are way far more important than segmental