The Application Of Contrastive Analysis In Teaching English Pronunciation

Many Chinese students can feel the existence of a perceptible distance between the English they speak and the target pure English and they always complain that they are speaking Chinese accent of English. This phenomenon, according to many years of linguistic study is traceable to the interference or negative transfer of our native language Chinese.This paper will elaborate on this theory and try to find out the fundamental obstacles of Chinese students so that teachers help them to have a through understanding in theory and make a marked progress in practice. On top of the investigation and analysis the existing problems in pronunciation teaching, I will make use of the theory of Contrastive Analysis to explain the nature of the mispronunciations made by Chinese students from three aspects—the phonetic interference, the rhythmical interference and the intonation interference. Besides, I will offer some strategies for Chinese teachers of English to improve their teaching. The research on the interference of Chinese, I hope, will break a new patch for us to learn to speak English as native speakers do.