A Study Of High School English Phonetics Teaching Based On Transfer Theory

In phonetics teaching, many English educators feel at a loss, so only simple imitation is adopted, which can not bring students a better understanding of English phonetics. The impact on English language learning from mother tongue has been concerned issues in the field of "second language acquisition", such as the language transfer theory applied by the author in this thesis, Interlanguage theory, and contrastive analysis. At present, educators and students have gradually become aware of the important role that English phonetic learning plays. The author hopes that through the use of language transfer theory to facilitate the learning of English phonetics. A lot of academic controversy occurred on language transfer theory; many people think that negative transfer is greater than positive transfer. As early as 1957, Robert Lado defined that learners always use transfer native language structure and words to the target language. Later, Odlin (1989) made the following definition on language transfer: transfer is the previously learned (maybe not perfect) knowledge impacts the target language by their similarities and differences between them. The theoretical study at abroad is flourish, while it is mostly in college English teaching and learning at home. That using the theory to guide English pronunciation in senior high schools is still relatively small. The author hopes that the following problems can be solved through the experiments and investigations: 1. Can transfer theory be applied to phonetics teaching practice and how to apply it? 2. With the application of transfer theory, what influence does it has on promoting the students'phonetics study in senior high school?For accomplishing the tentative plan and mission above, the author has designed an experiment on the basis of the predecessors'studying. The experiment lasted about six months, from September, 2009 to February, 2010. Two intact classes were chosen as participants from No. 17 Senior High School. The language transfer theory was supplied in experimental class (class 17). By the result of the experiment, the ability of phonetic studying is obviously prior of the students in controlled class. The experiment result has also indicated that mother tongue has produced an effect on English phonetic studying.This article is divided into five chapters: The first chapter is the literature review on phonetics learning and studying at home and abroad; the second chapter is the theoretical basis; the third chapter is the experimental design and methodology; the fourth chapter involves data analysis, findings and experimental limitations; Chapter Five is the implications and suggestions for the future study.