Vowels are an essential part of the speech system, and their accurate pronunciation plays a fundamental role in English speech acquisition. In recent years, Chinese college students have generally struggled to master English vowels due to negative transfer from their native language, perceptual imitation learning methods, and insufficient attention to speech instruction in colleges and universities. Existing studies have primarily focused on error analysis at the national level or specific speech points, and there is still a lack of empirical research on undergraduates in Shanxi. To this end, based on the experimental phonetics method of “perception + acoustics”, this paper focuses on 10 first-year students (5 males and five females) from Taiyuan University of Technology to conduct identification and cause analysis of English vowel pronunciation errors. In the experiment, the subjects read 20 English words containing vowels. The results were compared with standard British pronunciation (RP). Through experimental analysis, it was found that the subjects experienced difficulties, including problems with high and low tongue positions, confusion between front and back sounds, unclear distinctions between long and short vowels in the pronunciation of single vowels, and inadequate understanding of sliding and pronunciation transitions in the pronunciation of diphthongs. The study suggests that colleges and universities should strengthen explicit pronunciation teaching and develop a regional dialect-adaptive training mechanism to enhance learners’ English pronunciation abilities.
