Influence Of Chaoyang Dialect On Chaoyang Middle School Students’ English Pronunciation Learning

Correct English pronunciation plays an essential role in successful communication in English. Therefore, acquisition of English pronunciation is very important for Chinese English learners. With the development of research on second language acquisition, the effect of mother tongue on foreign language teaching and learning attracts more and more attention. Since there are various dialects in China, the influence of dialects on Chinese learners’learning of English pronunciation really needs more research.This survey mainly focuses on the interference of Chaoyang dialect on local middle school students’learning of some English sounds, with the purpose of improving local English teaching and learning. It also aims to justify the effectiveness and usefulness of Contrastive Analysis in the field of second language acquisition.On the basis of Contrastive Analysis and Sociolinguistics, the author first compared the similarities and differences between the pronunciation systems of English, Putonghua and Chaoyang dialect. Then the author predicted the possible difficulties in Chaoyang middle school students’ English pronunciation learning and put forward two hypotheses. The first hypothesis is negative transfer takes places when Chaoyang middle school students learn the English high-mid front close-mid lax unrounded vowel/e/, near-low front near-open lax unrounded vowel/as/, and diphthong/ai/. They are likely to use the low-mid front open-mid lax unrounded vowel<e> in their local dialect to replace the English monophthong/e/,/ae/, and diphthong/ai/. The second hypothesis is negative transfer occurs when Chaoyang middle school students learn the English semi-vowel/w/and labio-dental fricative/v/. They are inclined to confuse/v/with/w/as they do in their local dialect.In order to justify these two hypotheses, the author recorded the Chinese and English pronunciation of21students from one middle school in Chaoyang city, Liaoning Province. These participants, including10male subjects and11female subjects, were chosen according to certain criteria. And the reading material consists of two parts, Chinese and English.The result shows that all the subjects produced English monophthongs/e/and/ae/in a wrong way, and56%of the subjects turned the English diphthong/ai/into one monophthong without any gliding movement. Through the examination of SPSS, we can see clearly that there are no differences in the subjects’ pronunciation of English vowels/e, ae, ai/and the initial<e> in Chaoyang dialect of the subjects. Therefore, the first hypothesis has been confirmed, students in Chaoyang City did transfer<e> in their local dialect into their learning of the English/e, ae, ai/.As to the articulation of English semi-vowel/w/and labio-dental fricative/v/,66%subjects produced the bilabial approximant/w/like labio-dental fricative/v/, and61%of the subjects produced labio-dental fricative/v/like/w/, which means that most subjects did confused/w/with/v/, which is exactly the pronunciation habit in their local dialect.Thus, the two hypotheses put forward by the author have been fully justified. So have the explanatory and predictive power of Contrastive Analysis.