关键词: 音系学; 语音学; 语音教学; 音系意识

Abstract: Stereotyped as simple oral pronunciation training, pronunciation teaching is actually a process to guide the learners to achieve phonological acquisition of different phonetic forms. As a prerequisite for the successful acquisition of a foreign language, pronunciation teaching is one of the key links in foreign language teaching. This paper begins with a discussion of the main differences and similarities among phonology, phonetics and pronunciation teaching. Phonology is primarily concerned with the conceptual system of phonological symbols and phonetics mainly deals with the physical manifestation of these conceptual symbols. While the phonological concept of “a sound” may well be taken as a continuous “range of quantitative variations in phonetic values”, any value within which can be treated as that sound, the most representative one is the peak value of that range and its representativeness or typicality decreases gradually from the peak to the ends of both sides. The purport of pronunciation teaching is to help learners progress gradually from non-typical or non-representative interval values (or even some wrong values) to the most representative or typical peak value in their sound production and perception, and enable them to acquire the ability to distinguish phonetic values from different ranges, i.e., the phonological ability of sound production and perception. The fact that many of the beginners will often return to their original state soon after they receive the correction of their pronunciation reflects to some extent that a person’s oral pronunciation is in fact largely dependent on his underlying phonological awareness or ability. After identifying some of the major problems that exist in the current foreign language pronunciation teaching in China, the paper points out explicitly that the poor pronunciation of the non-native speakers mainly lies in the problem that the unstressed are often not unstressed enough in pronunciation. Therefore, in our pronunciation teaching, emphasis must be laid on the relation between the individual sounds and the overall natural flow that is composed of these sounds, and the relation between the individual stereotyped sound gesture and the general trend of elastic sound wave in our speech. Hence, the paper demonstrates in detail that our pronunciation teaching aims not merely to improve the learners' foreign language pronunciation, but more importantly to help the learners increase their phonological awareness, set up a system of inner phonological concepts of the language they intend to acquire, and truly grasp the actual pronunciation of the target language. 

Keywords: phonology; phonetics; pronunciation teaching; phonological awareness.