Abstract—This paper investigates the acquisition of /t/ by
Chinese EFL children aged from 3 to 5 in a language school.
Oral data were collected from 90 students with 30 in each age
group to ensure the experimental reliability. The study process
consisted of reading a word list and marking the score of each
student. Target sounds were recorded for the accuracy of
pronunciation by the investigators and several methods of
scoring would be utilized according to the performance of the
student participants for getting the most completed data. Data
analysis would be done by the statistics software. All the
student participants were not informed of the research purpose
during the experiment. The ultimate aim of the study is to find
the common features of /t/ acquisition by Chinese EFL children,
the reasons for the occurrence of the features and to discuss the
feasible learning approach for Chinese EFL children.
Index Terms—Child SLA, phonological acquisition, critical
period, contrastive analysis.
An Ran is with the Wuhan University, China (e-mail:
517131008@qq.com).
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Cite:An Ran, "A Study of Acquisition of /t/ by Chinese Pre-school EFL Children," International Journal of Languages, Literature and Linguistics vol. 5, no. 1, pp. 1-5, 2019.