The Influence Of Dialect On The Acquisition Of English Consonants

English has long been popularized and generalized in China,and the focus gradually turns from grammar to the better acquisition of Received Pronunciation(RP)which is widely accepted by people.The acquisition of consonants is more significant in its quantity,frequency of occurance and other aspects.Furthermore,there are various kinds of errors existing in the acquisition process of the learners from Gongyi area according to the author’s experience.Thus,this research discusses in what ways can Gongyi L1 influence speakers’ acquisition of English consonants and consonant clusters.Fifteen boy and fifteen girl students of Grade Two in Gongyi No.1 Senior High School are selected to participate in this research.Consonant clusters of all five types(CC(V),CCC(V),(V)CC,(V)CCC and(V)CCCC)are listed out with a word as example.With the help of Cool edit pro,Lenovo 7000-13 laptop and Sennheiser PC-3earphone,the speech material has been collected.And the author analyzed the errors through contrastive analysis and error analysis.The results have been examined on SPSS.And three research questions have been answered in this research:(1)What are the differences between Gongyi dialect and RP in their phonetic and phonological representation of consonant?(2)What kind of errors have been manifested through the acquisition of English consonants and consonant clusters by Gongyi L1 speakers?And how can they be explained by transfer theory respectively?(3)How can this research enlighten teachers’ teaching as well as students’ acquisition of standard English pronunciation from Gongyi? The results are: Substitution occurs frequently at all positions in both single consonant and consonant cluster.Epenthesis occurs mainly at word-final position and sometimes within multi-consonant cluster.Reduction occurs usually in multi-consonant clusters especially for word-final cluster.The conclusion of the paper is: Word-final consonant clusters are generally more difficult to acquire,the fewer consonants in the consonant clusters the easier for leaners to pronounce.And as for consonant used as singleton,consonants which have a similar counterpart in the learner’s mother language have been found difficult to acquire together with those that are unique in English.The research shows that teachers and learners should be more careful and aware of the knowledge about consonants which can enable them to avoid errors to some degree in the acquisition process.And the author hopes that studies on the acquisition of consonants in the future could be accomplished with more samples to make the research more reliable.