Factors Affecting The Miao College Students' English Phonetic Acquisition In The Bordering Area Of Hunan, Hubei, Guizhou And Chongqing

It is well known that language is a tool for people to communicate. The successful communication first begins in the oral form, in which phonetics plays a vital role. Phonetics is the shell as well as the nature of language, and correspondingly, phonetics is the foundation of language teaching.However, the teaching of phonetics has long been a weak point in language teaching in our country, and the students commonly have a poor phonetic knowledge. This phenomenon is especially seen in the minority people-inhabited places, where the economy and culture are less developed due to historical reasons. Take the Miao people densely gathered bordering area of Hunan, Hubei, Guizhou and Chongqing for instance, upon years of observation in teaching and the investigation made recently, the writer finds that the Miao students'English study has a regional feature of their own, and they have to overcome greater barriers than the Han nationality students in learning English phonetics. Both the Miao and the Han students share parts of the barriers, however, some parts are unique to the Miao students.Then what are the factors influencing the Miao students'English phonetic acquisition? This paper tries to explore these factors in a relatively comprehensive way.The major theoretical support of the paper comes from the theories of language transfer and second language acquisition. Briefly speaking, these theories include: the difference between the native language and the target language leads to difficulties and errors for the learners to learn the target language; in learning a new language system, the acquired knowledge of the native tongue affects the learners to form new language habits; the negative transfer of the native tongue is most obvious in phonetic level; the contrastive analysis has a close relationship with language learning and teaching, for it helps to find and explain the difficult points in the course of teaching, analyze students'errors, and suggest countermeasures to rid the negative transfer of the native tongue.Based on the above theories, this paper gives a detailed contrastive analysis of English, Chinese, and the Miao language in the aspects of segment phonemes, supra-segmentals, and the structure of syllables, exploring why and how the Miao students'native tongues (Chinese and the Miao language) influence their English phonetic acquisition. It is found that replacement is the most common reason for the Miao students'mispronunciation. They often use a similar phoneme in Chinese or the...