A Contrastive Study Of English And Chinese Pronunciation At The Segmental Level

Contrastive Analysis is a procedure of systematic comparison of LI and L2 in order to predict areas of greatest learning difficulty. Although nowadays Contrastive Analysis does not seem to be as popular as it used to be, no one can definitely deny its role in the teaching and learning of foreign language(FL for short) phonetics. It is based on this understanding that the writer of thepresent thesis makes a Contrastive study of the pronunciation of British English and Standard Chinese (Putonghua) and Xiang dialect Chinese.The contrastive study of the pronunciation of English and Chinese is carried at two levels: phoneme segments and syllable structure. And the contrastive study begins from the frequent errors made by learners of English from Xiang Dialectal area--the result of an investigation of thepronunciations of 50 freshmen in Hunan Normal University who speak the Xiang dialect. The conclusion of the study is that the differences between English and Chinese at phoneme segments and syllable structure are the main causes of the difficulties the Chinese learners of English confront and the mistakes learners commit. It is not good enough for the learner to master just the pronunciation of English phonemes. If he wants to do a good job in connected speech, he has to know more about the differences between English and Chinese syllable structures.This thesis consists of five chapters. They are,1 Introduction2 Native Language Transfer and Transfer Errors Made by Xiang Dialectal College Students in the Course of Learning EnglishPronunciation3 Contrastive Analysis of English and Chinese Phonemes4 Contrastive Analysis of the Syllable Structure of English and Chinese5 ConclusionIt is the writer's hope that the present thesis may be of some help to the teaching and learning of English phonetics for the college students in Hunan province.