Abstract : English pronunciation plays a very important role in English learning. And in particularly, it has a crucial influence on English listening and oral English. Nowadays, the majority of junior middle school students have many difficulties with their pronunciation of some phonemes, words and sentences because of the effects from their learning environments and other various conditions, and many students have no interest in English studying.  In order to help these students get improvement in their English pronunciation, the research on the pronunciation learning difficulties and causes is done so as to find the practical proposals on the basis of these difficulties and causes.  The basic methods applied for this research are class observation for three junior classes and questionnaires of the 130 students of the three classes. Without doubt, the communication with these students and their teachers are also helpful to the study，set the Nan Yang nine-year school in Pengzhou as an example. Through the research, we can know that their main difficulties are in learning some phonemes, words and pronunciation, lacking of tone, stress and intonation in sentence reading or in passage reading. The causes for these problems are bad English pronunciation foundation of the students, poor family conditions for English learning, lack of interests and attention to English pronunciation, competent insufficiency and attention deficiency for English pronunciation of English teachers. From the above causes to the English pronunciation learning difficulties, it is obvious to see that the efforts should be gathered by schools, teachers and country to take measures to create a good environment and condition for these students to improve their English pronunciation and to help them get the joy from English learning. 

Key words: English pronunciation ； difficulties ； causes ； measures

Contents

Abstract

摘要

1. Introduction.1

2. Literature review. 2 

   2.1 Review of related theories2

   2.2 Review of related empirical studies home and abroad.3

3. Methodology.4

   3.1 Research questions.,4

   3.2 Participants.4

   3.3 Research methods.,4

   3.4 Methods of data analysis5 

4. Main learning difficulties of English pronunciation for Middle

school students in the countryside.5

  4.1 Learning difficulties for part of phonemes.6

  4.2 Difficulties in words pronunciation6

  4.3. Lack of tone, stress and intonation in sentence reading or in passage reading.7

5. The causes for above English learning difficulties7

  5.1  Bad English pronunciation foundation of the students8

  5.2  Poor family English learning conditions.9

  5.3 Lack of interests and sufficient attention to the English pronunciation of the students.9

  5.4 Competent insufficiency and attention deficiency of English teachers.9

6. Feasible suggestions for these difficulties.10

  6.1 Correct English pronunciation learning concept.10

  6.2 Advanced studies and training for English teachers.11

  6.3 Diverse and flexible teaching methods for English pronunciation.11

  6.4 Good pronunciation environment for pronunciation test.11

7. Conclusion.12

Appendix.13

References.14