Improving English Pronunciation Teaching and Learning via Speech Corpora of Learners with Dialectal Backgrounds

Speech corpora play an important role in phonetic research and have been applied in daily life. Their application can be found in pronunciation teaching and learning. This article takes Jianghuai mandarin, a transitional dialect between northern and southern dialects in China, as an example to illustrate the necessity and procedures about the construction of an English speech corpus of learners with dialectal backgrounds. It shows that such corpus can be applied to help improve English pronunciation teaching and learning with its technical power in saving large audio data and its annotation with voice editing and analyzing software. It assists, when working together with Praat, to visually demonstrate spectrogram of similarities and differences between English and native language. It also functions to raise pronunciation awareness and help improve learners’ pronunciation. It is expected to be useful in stimulating teachers and learners to study pronunciation based on data analysis of physical features of recorded audio sound.