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摘要:虽然从20世纪80年代中期开始,有些地方已经出现了英语教学。在2001年之前,英语已成为中国小学的必修课。虽然教育部不执行任何英语教学的具体方法,但是小学英语的基本要求和设计都是由教育部印发。 一些小学英语教学方法开始发生变化,英语发音教学的变化便是其中之一。 在20年代,国际音标(IPA)是为了确保在最初阶段纠正发音和语调。然而,国际音标的基本要求是学习在小学英语教育需要的状态。因此,大部分小学的学生已删除(IPA), 并且永远不能在词汇表中出现。在2008年国际会议上小学英语教授陈林声称“注音符号”不应该在小学任教。相反,儿童应以教导和阅读的基本规则,并认识到‘eeea ”在口语中常常读作[i]等等。(陈,2008年)然而,对于人民教育出版社的初级教材仍然存在很多不同的意见。在小学生不知道音标的情况下学习英语是否真的很好?
关键词:国际音标;第二语言习得;学习
中图分类号:H08文献标识码:A文章编号:1009-0118(2010)-03-0014-03
一、INTRODUCTION
Although some teaching of English has taken place since the mid 1980s, it is until the year 2001 that English has become a compulsory course in primary schools in China. In 2001, the Basic Requirement for Primary School English was designed and issued by the Chinese Ministry of Education. Although it does not enforce any specific method for English teaching, some English teaching methods in primary school began to change, and the change in English pronunciation teaching is one of them.
In the 20s, there was always a strong emphasis on learning International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) to ensure correct pronunciation and intonation at the initial stage. However, the Basic Requirement states that IPA learning is not required in primary school English education. As a result, most of textbooks written for primary school students deleted IPA, and it can never be found in the vocabulary lists. On 2008 International Conference on Primary English, Professor Chen Lin claimed even clearer that “Phonetic symbols should not be taught at primary school. Instead, children should by and by be taught the basic Rules of Reading and made to understand that ee, ea are usually pronounced /i:/ in words, etc.”.(Chen, 2008) Yet, there are still numerous divisions over the necessity of PLA teaching in primary school. Whether it’s really good for primary school students learning English without the knowledge of IPA?
二、Literature Review
According to the previous studies, there are some reasons that people opposed to teach IPA in primary schools. Professor Chen from Tsinghua University explained that IPA is just a serious of symbols, that the symbol itself cannot teach people any accurate pronunciation. He believes that for primary school students, there will be an extra confusion if IPA is taught—for example, students may regard “ai” in “mail” as “[ai]”. He also suggests that teachers should abandon the IPA but show students some natural connection between the pronunciations and the alphabets, such as “ee” is usually pronounced [i:]. And as primary school students are only required to recognize less than 700 new words, he thought the dictionary with IPA is not necessary. (Cheng, 2001) Later, some researchers also claim that IPA may put extra pressure on primary school students. As a result, students may feel it is difficult to learn English and finally lose the interest in English. (Chen, 2007)
However, some people, especially primary school teachers, began to doubt the discard of IPA teaching in primary education. They pointed out that learning IPA can strengthen pupils’ phonetic awareness.(Ye, 2009) Li’s (2008) research confirmed that learning IPA have positive effects on improving reading skills. Also, many people believe that IPA can be used as an effective tool to help pupils memorizing new words. (Deng, 2003) Some primary teachers also claim that IPA learning can also be interesting; and it will not decrease but increase the interest in English.(Xu, 2009) On the other hand, there are actually some problems existing in current primary school English learning, which are caused by repealing IPA learning. One of the most visible problems is that some pupils may use Chinese words, which sound similar but not the same to the pronunciation of English words, to help them recognize English words. However, this bad habit always leads to inaccurate pronunciation. (Xi, 2004)
三、Aims of this paper
For studying a second or foreign language, IPA is mainly used to learn the pronunciation. Heretofore, most researches paid more attention to the external influences of teaching IPA in primary schools (interest in English, memorizing new words, pressure of studying, etc.). Focusing on the main purpose of using IPA, this paper is aimed to demonstrate that knowing PLA cannot be a guarantee for standard pronunciation, but can help students form a standard pronunciation. And then though discussion, the paper is due to illustrate that PLA should be taught to high-grade pupils (Grade 4-6) and used as a helpful tool for their English study in China. The methods used in this survey are observation, questionnaire and pronunciation tests.
四、METHOD
1、 Observation
Being an English tutor for Zhanghan, a grade 4 pupil from Tsinghua University Primary school, I found some pronunciation problems caused by not knowing IPA:
a. She had those common pronunciation problems that Chinese people always had—c is read as [sei], v as [vei], n as [?n], etc.
b. She always use Chinese words to memorize the pronunciation of English words; as a result, her pronunciation is more “Chinglish” than English—“daughter” is uttered as“多个特儿”, etc.
c. She will learn the sounds of new words by using the electronic dictionary; yet, she cannot clearly get the accurate pronunciation—she always reads “this”as [zeis], etc.
d. She cannot distinguish the exact pronunciation of words, bad & bed, live & leave for example; she pronounced those words as totally the same.
2、Questionnaires
60 students in higher-grades (Grade 4-6) are randomly chosen from Tsinghua University Primary School: 20 students from each Grade. They are all learning English as a L2, and began to learn English after entering primary school. English is taught from Grade 1 to Grade 6 in Tsinghua University Primary School, and the “Primary School English”, published by Tsinghua University publication, is used as their English textbook. IPA is not included in the textbook, and also not included in the vocabulary list. Also, English teachers in the school do not teach any IPA.
Some of questions are listed as below:
Have you ever learnt International Phonetic Alphabet? Learn from foreigners or Chinese?
Do you have or had ever had foreign teachers for more than 3 months?
What kind of tools do you use to help memorizing the pronunciation of words taught by your teachers?
What will you do whenever you meet some new words (especially when you don’t know the pronunciation)?
3、 Pronunciation test
Students are asked to read the following alphabet and words chosen from their textbook. IPA is written beside.
Alphabets: C, N, V (1 score for each alphabet, 3 in total)
Words: this, bad & bed, mind & mend, listen (1 score for each word, 6 in total)
Paragraph: (5 for accurate sounds, 1 for tone, 6 in total)
Please call Stella. Ask her to bring these things with her from the shop:Six spoons of fresh snow peas, five pieces of blue cheese, and maybe a snack for her brother Bob.We also need a small snake and a big toy for the kids. And we will go meet her Wednesday at the train station.
(The elicitation paragraph contains most of the consonants, vowels, and clusters of standard English) (Cook)
4、Calculation
According to the answers to questionnaires, students are separated into 4 groups.
Group A: students who didn’t learnt IPA and never had foreign teachers
Group B: students who didn’t learnt IPA but have or ever had foreign teachers for more than 3 months.
Group C: students who learnt IPA from foreign teachers
Group D: students who learnt IPA from Chinese people
Calculate the total scores for each student’s English pronunciation, and then calculate the average score for each group. The result is shown in table (1)
Table (1)
五、DATA ANALYSIS
Collecting all data through observation, questionnaires and pronunciation tests, some main
findings can be summarized as below:
1、Whether IPA can or cannot teach pupils (L2 learners) standard English (L2) pronunciation is not clear, but it is true that the pronunciation of teachers may influence pupils pronunciation.
According to table (1), it is obvious that pupils belonging to Group C may have better pronunciations, and pupils of Group A may pronounce worse than other groups. However, the scores of Group D and Group B are quite similar, so we cannot ensure that the pronunciation of Group D is absolutely better than Group B.
Considering pronunciations of teachers, table (2) is set.
Group Average Scores
Learn Part From Foreign Teacher 13.30769
Learn All From Chinese People 10.66032
Table (2)
Reasonably, all foreign teachers can be considered as people with standard pronunciation, but the pronunciation of some Chinese people (both teachers and parents) who taught those pupils English might not be that standard, so I think Prof. Cheng’s claim—that IPAs are just symbols, which cannot teach people accurate pronunciation—is somehow reasonable.
2、Pupils knowing IPA are more likely to have a standard English pronunciation than Pupils who do not know IPA.
Though the result of tests cannot indicate the exact influence of IPA on standard pronunciation, but comparing the average scores between Group A and Group D, we state confidently that If we cannot make sure the English words pronounced by teachers are standard or not, IPA can exactly be used as an effective tool, trying to increase the possibility of learning and uttering standard English.
六、DISCUSSION
According to the survey above, I think IPA should be used as a tool, helping primary school students in higher-grades to learn a more standard pronunciation.
1、IPA can solve some problems which may lead to primary school students’ nonstandard English pronunciations.
Referring to the observation and survey, some reasons that IPA can help pupils have a more standard pronunciation can be reasonably summarized as below:
(1) IPA can be used to decrease the negative influence on pupils’ English pronunciations from people who teach them English.
Most pupils may learn English from Chinese people, both parents and teachers, but the pronunciations of their teachers or parents may not standard. If pupils know the standard pronunciations of IPA, they may not accept all pronunciations directly, but at least doubt those pronunciations; then they may possibly use IPA to get a more standard pronunciation.
(2) IPA can be used to solve the problem of ambiguous pronunciation while learning
Primary school teachers may always read English words and sentences slowly and drawly, trying to pronounce clearly enough for their students to learn. However, the drawling sounds may cause some ambiguous pronunciations, such as the word “this” is learnt by many Chinese pupils as [zeis], mostly because of the drawling utterances of sentences “This is …” Also, some words sound really similar, such as leave & leaf & live, students, especially young pupils, may believe these words are uttered same; in other words, students may not get the exact pronunciation while teachers are reading. The same problems may occur when pupils use electronic dictionary to utter the new words. Because of the technical limitations and pupils having different levels of phonetic awareness, it is common that pupils may get ambiguous pronunciations.
However, if IPA is known by pupils, they may learn pronunciation by listening to their teachers’ sounds, and use IPA to help them differentiate the ambiguous pronunciation, and get the standard pronunciations.
(3) IPA can be used to solve the pronunciation problems caused by using other ways to memorize the pronunciation
Actually, it is not easy for students to keep the pronunciation of new words immediately and effectively in school. So whenever pupils think the pronunciation is difficult to memorize, they will write down some notes to help memorizing. People who know IPA may absolutely write the corresponding IPA beside; but pupils, who don’t know IPA, may use some other ways, and the most common way is using Chinese characters. However, all those ways cannot always represent standard pronunciations, and then some problems may occur, such as a Grade 4 student utter the word “bamboo” as “八木布”. It is obvious that this kind of problem can be solved if they use IPA, the standard tool to describe sounds, to help memorizing.
2、 Learning standard pronunciation of IPA is much easier and more effective than learning standard pronunciation of every English word.
It’s difficult for us to make sure that all Chinese teachers could have standard English pronunciations, especially teachers living in rural area; and it is also difficult to ensure that pupil could learn the standard pronunciation of every word (at least those 700 required words taught in primary school). Yet, it is much more possible to surely teach both teachers and pupils and let them totally grasping the stand standard pronunciations of IPA; then they can use IPA to get more standard pronunciations of words and sentences.
3、The English pronunciation and IPA teaching for primary students
(1) The standard pronunciation should be learnt in primary school.
Krashen(1982) claims that younger people may develop better phonology, pronunciation and intonations of a L2 than older people. A research also showed that only a small minority of those bilinguals who had started their L2 learning after age L2, but a majority of those with an age of onset below this age, actually pronounced the standard second language—in the research, “standard” is described as speaking like native speakers.( Abrahamsson & Hyltenstam, 2009)
In china, the age for primary school is from 6 to 12, and English can be regarded as a second language for Chinese students. So, it is reasonably to suggest that Chinese people, as second language learners, should learn standard pronunciation in primary school.
It is certain that older L2 learners may acquire fast than elder, (Cook, 2003) and that’s why they believe Chinese students should learn IPA in middle school. However, the survey above indicating that pupils may have difficulties in acquiring standard English pronunciation without the knowledge of IPA. Krashen (1982) pointed out that the critical period for L2 learners may end at 10 to 12, so it will be too late to learn the standard pronunciation in middle school. Also, those nonstandard sounds may unconsciously become a kind of individual accent. As a result, it is much harder to revise the pronunciations of people, who are older but have a higher level of learning abilities, than to directly let them acquire the standard pronunciation when they are young.
(2) Considering the cognitive development of pupils, it is certain that higher-grades pupils have the ability to learn IPA.
From the observation and the syllabus of Tsinghua Long School, which is a after-school class for most of Tsinghua primary school students, we can find that primary school students began to learn grammar after Grade 3. The ability of learning systematical grammar is the fact, reasonably indicating the cognitive development of higher-grades pupils is high enough for them to learn IPA systematically.
七、CONCLUSION
The basic aim of primary education is reading, speaking and using English, and all these purposes are closely related to acquiring a standard English pronunciation. For studying a second or foreign language, IPA is mainly used as a tool, describing the sounds of words for learners to pronounce. The survey and discussion above showing clearly that IPA should be taught to higher-grades primary school students for learning a more standard English pronunciation. However, whether IPA can exactly be taught in primary schools, and which grades should IPA learning begin is still need further discussion. For example, the study of positive and negative externalities of learning IPA should be considered. The positive externalities of learning IPA, such as helping memorizing vocabularies, improving the ability to study, capability of using dictionary to study English, increasing the confidence of speaking, etc. may support the idea that IPA should be taught in primary school. However, the discussion of negative externalities may more difficult to reach an agreement: some of them can be solved, such as the problem of decreasing the interest in learning English can be solved by teaching IPA in games; but some problems cannot be solved easily, such as students may distinguish IPA with English alphabet and Chinese phonetic alphabet. Moreover, there are some ambiguous effects, such as it is not clear that whether IPA add more pressure by teaching pupils an extra series of alphabets, or it decreases their pressure from memorizing different pronunciations of hundreds of words. However, it is reasonable to confirm that IPA is an effective and useful tool that can help people acquiring standard English pronunciation. And it’s true that there are some problems in current primary school English pronunciation teaching. So, even though IPA may not be taught in primary school, the government should also find some other ways to improve the pronunciation teaching in primary schools.
WORK CITED:
[1]Abrahamsson, N & Hyltenstam, K·(2009) Age of Onset and Nativelikeness in a Second Language: Listener Perception Versus Linguistic Scrutiny. Language Learning, 59(2), 249-306.
[2]Bylund,E·(2009) Effects of age of L2 acquisition on L1 event conceptualization patterns.Bilingualism-Language And Cognition.12(3), 305-322.
[3]Chen, K. (2007), The Discussion about IPA Teaching in Primary School. Journal of Basic English Education, 10(6), 69-72.
[4]Chen, L·(2008). Primary School English Education in China, Retrieved Jan 17, 2010, from http://www.fltrp.com/newsdetail.cfm?icntno=87222.
[5]Cheng, M·S., (2001, April 5). IPA should not be used by primary school students. Beijing Sol. p.1.
[6]Cook, V· (2003), 'Materials for adult beginners from an L2 User Perspective', in B. Tomlinson (ed.), Developing Materials for Language Teaching. London: Continuum (2003), 275-290.
[7]Cook, V. The speech accent archive. Retrieved Jan 17, 2010, from http://accent.gmu.edu/howto.php#method
[8]Deng, Y·L., (2003). Should pupils learn IPA? Journal of Xinxiang Education College, 16(1), 7.
[9]Krashen, S·(1982), Accounting for child-adult differences in second language rate and attainment. In Krashen, S., Scarcella, R. & Long, M· (Ed.), Child adult differences in second language acquisition ( pp. 202-26). Newbury: Mass.
[10]Li, C·E·(2008), Individual experience: IPA Teaching in Primary School, Science & Technology Information, 7(5), 26.
[11]Xu, L·(2009), Phonetic Symbol Teaching: A Problem Which Cannot Be Neglected in English Education in Primary School. Journal of Hunan First Normal College.2009, 2, 56-57.
[12]Xi, X·F·(2004), A Talk on the Development of the English Phonetics and English Teaching, Journal of Longdong University(Social Science Edition), 15(2), 92-96.
[13]Ye, W·B, (2009). Individual Opinion for IPA Teaching in Primary School. The Science Education Article Collects,31(5),147-149.
关键词:国际音标;第二语言习得;学习
中图分类号:H08文献标识码:A文章编号:1009-0118(2010)-03-0014-03
一、INTRODUCTION
Although some teaching of English has taken place since the mid 1980s, it is until the year 2001 that English has become a compulsory course in primary schools in China. In 2001, the Basic Requirement for Primary School English was designed and issued by the Chinese Ministry of Education. Although it does not enforce any specific method for English teaching, some English teaching methods in primary school began to change, and the change in English pronunciation teaching is one of them.
In the 20s, there was always a strong emphasis on learning International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) to ensure correct pronunciation and intonation at the initial stage. However, the Basic Requirement states that IPA learning is not required in primary school English education. As a result, most of textbooks written for primary school students deleted IPA, and it can never be found in the vocabulary lists. On 2008 International Conference on Primary English, Professor Chen Lin claimed even clearer that “Phonetic symbols should not be taught at primary school. Instead, children should by and by be taught the basic Rules of Reading and made to understand that ee, ea are usually pronounced /i:/ in words, etc.”.(Chen, 2008) Yet, there are still numerous divisions over the necessity of PLA teaching in primary school. Whether it’s really good for primary school students learning English without the knowledge of IPA?
二、Literature Review
According to the previous studies, there are some reasons that people opposed to teach IPA in primary schools. Professor Chen from Tsinghua University explained that IPA is just a serious of symbols, that the symbol itself cannot teach people any accurate pronunciation. He believes that for primary school students, there will be an extra confusion if IPA is taught—for example, students may regard “ai” in “mail” as “[ai]”. He also suggests that teachers should abandon the IPA but show students some natural connection between the pronunciations and the alphabets, such as “ee” is usually pronounced [i:]. And as primary school students are only required to recognize less than 700 new words, he thought the dictionary with IPA is not necessary. (Cheng, 2001) Later, some researchers also claim that IPA may put extra pressure on primary school students. As a result, students may feel it is difficult to learn English and finally lose the interest in English. (Chen, 2007)
However, some people, especially primary school teachers, began to doubt the discard of IPA teaching in primary education. They pointed out that learning IPA can strengthen pupils’ phonetic awareness.(Ye, 2009) Li’s (2008) research confirmed that learning IPA have positive effects on improving reading skills. Also, many people believe that IPA can be used as an effective tool to help pupils memorizing new words. (Deng, 2003) Some primary teachers also claim that IPA learning can also be interesting; and it will not decrease but increase the interest in English.(Xu, 2009) On the other hand, there are actually some problems existing in current primary school English learning, which are caused by repealing IPA learning. One of the most visible problems is that some pupils may use Chinese words, which sound similar but not the same to the pronunciation of English words, to help them recognize English words. However, this bad habit always leads to inaccurate pronunciation. (Xi, 2004)
三、Aims of this paper
For studying a second or foreign language, IPA is mainly used to learn the pronunciation. Heretofore, most researches paid more attention to the external influences of teaching IPA in primary schools (interest in English, memorizing new words, pressure of studying, etc.). Focusing on the main purpose of using IPA, this paper is aimed to demonstrate that knowing PLA cannot be a guarantee for standard pronunciation, but can help students form a standard pronunciation. And then though discussion, the paper is due to illustrate that PLA should be taught to high-grade pupils (Grade 4-6) and used as a helpful tool for their English study in China. The methods used in this survey are observation, questionnaire and pronunciation tests.
四、METHOD
1、 Observation
Being an English tutor for Zhanghan, a grade 4 pupil from Tsinghua University Primary school, I found some pronunciation problems caused by not knowing IPA:
a. She had those common pronunciation problems that Chinese people always had—c is read as [sei], v as [vei], n as [?n], etc.
b. She always use Chinese words to memorize the pronunciation of English words; as a result, her pronunciation is more “Chinglish” than English—“daughter” is uttered as“多个特儿”, etc.
c. She will learn the sounds of new words by using the electronic dictionary; yet, she cannot clearly get the accurate pronunciation—she always reads “this”as [zeis], etc.
d. She cannot distinguish the exact pronunciation of words, bad & bed, live & leave for example; she pronounced those words as totally the same.
2、Questionnaires
60 students in higher-grades (Grade 4-6) are randomly chosen from Tsinghua University Primary School: 20 students from each Grade. They are all learning English as a L2, and began to learn English after entering primary school. English is taught from Grade 1 to Grade 6 in Tsinghua University Primary School, and the “Primary School English”, published by Tsinghua University publication, is used as their English textbook. IPA is not included in the textbook, and also not included in the vocabulary list. Also, English teachers in the school do not teach any IPA.
Some of questions are listed as below:
Have you ever learnt International Phonetic Alphabet? Learn from foreigners or Chinese?
Do you have or had ever had foreign teachers for more than 3 months?
What kind of tools do you use to help memorizing the pronunciation of words taught by your teachers?
What will you do whenever you meet some new words (especially when you don’t know the pronunciation)?
3、 Pronunciation test
Students are asked to read the following alphabet and words chosen from their textbook. IPA is written beside.
Alphabets: C, N, V (1 score for each alphabet, 3 in total)
Words: this, bad & bed, mind & mend, listen (1 score for each word, 6 in total)
Paragraph: (5 for accurate sounds, 1 for tone, 6 in total)
Please call Stella. Ask her to bring these things with her from the shop:Six spoons of fresh snow peas, five pieces of blue cheese, and maybe a snack for her brother Bob.We also need a small snake and a big toy for the kids. And we will go meet her Wednesday at the train station.
(The elicitation paragraph contains most of the consonants, vowels, and clusters of standard English) (Cook)
4、Calculation
According to the answers to questionnaires, students are separated into 4 groups.
Group A: students who didn’t learnt IPA and never had foreign teachers
Group B: students who didn’t learnt IPA but have or ever had foreign teachers for more than 3 months.
Group C: students who learnt IPA from foreign teachers
Group D: students who learnt IPA from Chinese people
Calculate the total scores for each student’s English pronunciation, and then calculate the average score for each group. The result is shown in table (1)
Table (1)
五、DATA ANALYSIS
Collecting all data through observation, questionnaires and pronunciation tests, some main
findings can be summarized as below:
1、Whether IPA can or cannot teach pupils (L2 learners) standard English (L2) pronunciation is not clear, but it is true that the pronunciation of teachers may influence pupils pronunciation.
According to table (1), it is obvious that pupils belonging to Group C may have better pronunciations, and pupils of Group A may pronounce worse than other groups. However, the scores of Group D and Group B are quite similar, so we cannot ensure that the pronunciation of Group D is absolutely better than Group B.
Considering pronunciations of teachers, table (2) is set.
Group Average Scores
Learn Part From Foreign Teacher 13.30769
Learn All From Chinese People 10.66032
Table (2)
Reasonably, all foreign teachers can be considered as people with standard pronunciation, but the pronunciation of some Chinese people (both teachers and parents) who taught those pupils English might not be that standard, so I think Prof. Cheng’s claim—that IPAs are just symbols, which cannot teach people accurate pronunciation—is somehow reasonable.
2、Pupils knowing IPA are more likely to have a standard English pronunciation than Pupils who do not know IPA.
Though the result of tests cannot indicate the exact influence of IPA on standard pronunciation, but comparing the average scores between Group A and Group D, we state confidently that If we cannot make sure the English words pronounced by teachers are standard or not, IPA can exactly be used as an effective tool, trying to increase the possibility of learning and uttering standard English.
六、DISCUSSION
According to the survey above, I think IPA should be used as a tool, helping primary school students in higher-grades to learn a more standard pronunciation.
1、IPA can solve some problems which may lead to primary school students’ nonstandard English pronunciations.
Referring to the observation and survey, some reasons that IPA can help pupils have a more standard pronunciation can be reasonably summarized as below:
(1) IPA can be used to decrease the negative influence on pupils’ English pronunciations from people who teach them English.
Most pupils may learn English from Chinese people, both parents and teachers, but the pronunciations of their teachers or parents may not standard. If pupils know the standard pronunciations of IPA, they may not accept all pronunciations directly, but at least doubt those pronunciations; then they may possibly use IPA to get a more standard pronunciation.
(2) IPA can be used to solve the problem of ambiguous pronunciation while learning
Primary school teachers may always read English words and sentences slowly and drawly, trying to pronounce clearly enough for their students to learn. However, the drawling sounds may cause some ambiguous pronunciations, such as the word “this” is learnt by many Chinese pupils as [zeis], mostly because of the drawling utterances of sentences “This is …” Also, some words sound really similar, such as leave & leaf & live, students, especially young pupils, may believe these words are uttered same; in other words, students may not get the exact pronunciation while teachers are reading. The same problems may occur when pupils use electronic dictionary to utter the new words. Because of the technical limitations and pupils having different levels of phonetic awareness, it is common that pupils may get ambiguous pronunciations.
However, if IPA is known by pupils, they may learn pronunciation by listening to their teachers’ sounds, and use IPA to help them differentiate the ambiguous pronunciation, and get the standard pronunciations.
(3) IPA can be used to solve the pronunciation problems caused by using other ways to memorize the pronunciation
Actually, it is not easy for students to keep the pronunciation of new words immediately and effectively in school. So whenever pupils think the pronunciation is difficult to memorize, they will write down some notes to help memorizing. People who know IPA may absolutely write the corresponding IPA beside; but pupils, who don’t know IPA, may use some other ways, and the most common way is using Chinese characters. However, all those ways cannot always represent standard pronunciations, and then some problems may occur, such as a Grade 4 student utter the word “bamboo” as “八木布”. It is obvious that this kind of problem can be solved if they use IPA, the standard tool to describe sounds, to help memorizing.
2、 Learning standard pronunciation of IPA is much easier and more effective than learning standard pronunciation of every English word.
It’s difficult for us to make sure that all Chinese teachers could have standard English pronunciations, especially teachers living in rural area; and it is also difficult to ensure that pupil could learn the standard pronunciation of every word (at least those 700 required words taught in primary school). Yet, it is much more possible to surely teach both teachers and pupils and let them totally grasping the stand standard pronunciations of IPA; then they can use IPA to get more standard pronunciations of words and sentences.
3、The English pronunciation and IPA teaching for primary students
(1) The standard pronunciation should be learnt in primary school.
Krashen(1982) claims that younger people may develop better phonology, pronunciation and intonations of a L2 than older people. A research also showed that only a small minority of those bilinguals who had started their L2 learning after age L2, but a majority of those with an age of onset below this age, actually pronounced the standard second language—in the research, “standard” is described as speaking like native speakers.( Abrahamsson & Hyltenstam, 2009)
In china, the age for primary school is from 6 to 12, and English can be regarded as a second language for Chinese students. So, it is reasonably to suggest that Chinese people, as second language learners, should learn standard pronunciation in primary school.
It is certain that older L2 learners may acquire fast than elder, (Cook, 2003) and that’s why they believe Chinese students should learn IPA in middle school. However, the survey above indicating that pupils may have difficulties in acquiring standard English pronunciation without the knowledge of IPA. Krashen (1982) pointed out that the critical period for L2 learners may end at 10 to 12, so it will be too late to learn the standard pronunciation in middle school. Also, those nonstandard sounds may unconsciously become a kind of individual accent. As a result, it is much harder to revise the pronunciations of people, who are older but have a higher level of learning abilities, than to directly let them acquire the standard pronunciation when they are young.
(2) Considering the cognitive development of pupils, it is certain that higher-grades pupils have the ability to learn IPA.
From the observation and the syllabus of Tsinghua Long School, which is a after-school class for most of Tsinghua primary school students, we can find that primary school students began to learn grammar after Grade 3. The ability of learning systematical grammar is the fact, reasonably indicating the cognitive development of higher-grades pupils is high enough for them to learn IPA systematically.
七、CONCLUSION
The basic aim of primary education is reading, speaking and using English, and all these purposes are closely related to acquiring a standard English pronunciation. For studying a second or foreign language, IPA is mainly used as a tool, describing the sounds of words for learners to pronounce. The survey and discussion above showing clearly that IPA should be taught to higher-grades primary school students for learning a more standard English pronunciation. However, whether IPA can exactly be taught in primary schools, and which grades should IPA learning begin is still need further discussion. For example, the study of positive and negative externalities of learning IPA should be considered. The positive externalities of learning IPA, such as helping memorizing vocabularies, improving the ability to study, capability of using dictionary to study English, increasing the confidence of speaking, etc. may support the idea that IPA should be taught in primary school. However, the discussion of negative externalities may more difficult to reach an agreement: some of them can be solved, such as the problem of decreasing the interest in learning English can be solved by teaching IPA in games; but some problems cannot be solved easily, such as students may distinguish IPA with English alphabet and Chinese phonetic alphabet. Moreover, there are some ambiguous effects, such as it is not clear that whether IPA add more pressure by teaching pupils an extra series of alphabets, or it decreases their pressure from memorizing different pronunciations of hundreds of words. However, it is reasonable to confirm that IPA is an effective and useful tool that can help people acquiring standard English pronunciation. And it’s true that there are some problems in current primary school English pronunciation teaching. So, even though IPA may not be taught in primary school, the government should also find some other ways to improve the pronunciation teaching in primary schools.
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