A Research On The Negative Transfer Of Minnan Dialect On Junior High School Students’ English Pronunciation

As a vital aspect of the L2acquisition, foreign learners too experience phonologicaldifficulties related to different sounds and meanings, but can also improve their speakingimmeasurably. What makes some words phonetically difficult than others very muchdetermined by the learners’ L1system. The L1system may be responsible for the learners’inability of L2. In China, the fact is that there are enormous students who speak English withovert local accent. Mother tongue (L1) interference not only affects the students’ Englishcommunication ability, but also interfere students with the acquisitions of other linguisticfeatures such as speaking, reading and writing skills. Under this circumstance, thisdissertation attempts to identify the phenomenon in-depth that the factors of interferences tostudents’ English pronunciation in some dialect area in China with detailed investigation andresearch methods. In that case, providing both teachers and students practical teachingmethods and extra information about spoken English thus help they achieve the goal ofimproved comprehension and intelligibility.As one of the eight primary language families, Min Nan counts a lot. It is widelyspoken by a large group with a population of60million, not only in parts of China such assouthern Fujian, Taiwan, eastern Guangdong, Hainan, and southern Zhejiang, but also spokenby descendants of emigrants from these areas among overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia.Due to consequences of factors for instance the socio-economy, language atmosphere, culturalbackground etc., today the English learning status of Min-nan speaking students exhibitssome distinctive features which are geographical and typical. The most prominentphenomenon perform that a majority of these students pronouncing with noticeable Minnanaccents. In spite of the fact that there are numbers of teachers who draw attention to thesecircumstance, students’ pronunciation levels have not been substantially upgradedscientifically yet. In the practical teaching procedure, most schools often ignore theimportance of pronunciation teaching in their curriculum. In addition, the strain fromstudents’ even teaching capabilities and the limited phonological levels of some certainteachers should be counted on this bottleneck. In Minnan-speaking regions, pressing problems considering English pronunciation teaching should be solved straight away. They may berefined in various aspects e.g., how to aid the student to overcome the interference of theirmother tongue, how to motivate teachers to facilitate students’ pronunciation capabilities withaltered teaching concepts and approaches and so on.In doing so, guided not only assumptions but also analysis driven by the data of theparticular phonetic features in term of dialects and accents in various regions, but alsodrawing on their specific effects on the phonetic study existed.The main purpose of this dissertation is to focuses on an exhibition of the status that howthe junior high school students in Zhangzhou have been influenced by the local dialect andaccent they have. Following a quantitative approach within the relevant theories of phoneticteaching, it also explores interferences of their English pronunciation in terms of students ofthese area affected by negative phonological transfer through data questionnaires,interviews together with phonetic testing and other research methods.240third-year studentsand10corresponding English teachers of Zhangzhou Experimental Middle School have beeninvolved. By applying the software of Microsoft Excel and variance analysis of data, thefindings manifest that their negative phonological transfer mainly demonstrate in four aspects,respectively, are the English long vowels short vowels; diphthongs; voiceless and voicedconsonants; consonant clusters and plosive consonants. It is in hope that the findings willenrich the syllabus databases for phonetic teaching, which will lessen the negative transfer ofdialect to English Pronunciation learning. It may endow with an effective pronunciationsyllabus in secondary schools and make the students seem to acquire serviceablepronunciation in their English studies anyway.