Transfer In Zoucheng Middle School Students’ Learning Of English Alveolar And Palato-Alveolar Fricatives And Affricates

Accurate and fluent English pronunciation can not only help the learners of English as a Foreign Language (EFL for short) improve their speaking and listening abilities, but also help them improve their communicative abilities. English is one of the main foreign languages in China, and Chinese is one of the main reasons that affect their English phonetics acquisition. As for the middle school EFL learners in Zoucheng, Shandong Province, the local dialect, to a certain degree, influences their English pronunciation learning.This study is mainly a small survey about transfer in Zoucheng middle school students’ learning of English alveolar and palato-alveolar fricatives and affricates with the purpose of re-evaluating the predictability of Lado’s strong version of Contrastive Analysis (CA for short).This study first tried to find out the similarities and differences of the consonantal systems of English, Putonghua and Zoucheng dialect through contrastive analysis. Then, according to the strong version of CA, which claims the predicative power, three hypotheses which predicated Zoucheng middle school students’ learning of the English alveolar and palato-alveolar fricatives and affricates were put forward. First, there would be positive transfer when the Zoucheng middle school EFL learners learn the English alveolar fricatives [s][z]. Second, negative transfer would take place when the local learners pronounce the English palato-alveolar consonants [t∫][d3][∫][3]. Third, the learners would tend to use the blade-alveolar fricatives and blade-alveolar affricates/s//c//z//r/in their dialect to replace the English palato-alveolar consonants.In order to verify those hypotheses and the strong version of CA, the author conducted a small scale survey in Zoucheng No.1Middle School.95students from two classes in the second year were selected to do the questionnaire about the English pronunciation learning.10of those subjects were chosen to be the main subjects of this survey, and they were asked to participate in a pre-test, a post-test and an interview. The pre-test contained two parts:a test of Chinese pronunciation and a test of the English phonetics. The post-test only contained a test of the English phonetics. The test of Chinese aimed to collect the subjects’reading materials in Putonghua and Zoucheng dialect; the test of the English phonetics included four parts:Phonemes, Words, Phrases and Sentences, and each part contained the relevant consonants:[t∫][(?)][∫][3][s][z], and all the subjects’readings were recorded.In order to make the results of the tests more scientific and accurate, all the subjects’ recordings were analyzed with the spectrograms which were made with Praat, and those spectrograms were compared with the spectrograms of Ladefoged’s standard pronunciation so as to figure out whether the subjects’ pronunciation was right or wrong.The data from the questionnaire, interview and the pre-test of the English phonetics showed that for the middle school EFL learners in Zoucheng, the English palato-alveolar consonants [t∫][(?)][∫][3] were the most difficult consonants to learn; positive transfer really happened when the local learners learned the English alveolar fricatives [s][z]; negative transfer did take place when they learned the English palato-alveolar consonants; and the majority of them indeed used/c//z//s//r/to replace the English palato-alveolar consonants [t∫][(?)][∫][(?)]. Thus all the three hypotheses based on the strong version of Lado’s Contrastive Analysis were justified.The results of the post-test after two weeks’ practice showed that most of the subjects made some progress in their pronunciation of the English palato-alveolars [t∫][(?)][∫][3], though due to certain factors they still had some problems in making these four consonants always correct.