On Influence Of Shandong Dialects To The Acquisition Of English Consonants And The Teaching Solutions

The mastery of English consonants is important for the students who study English to develop standard pronunciation. Accurate pronunciation is not only helpful to the improvement of listening, speaking and reading abilities, but also essential for the proper and effective communication through the target language. However, the acquisition of the pronunciation of a foreign language is often affected by the learners' national or regional phonetic system, which is often mentioned as negative transfer. Knowing the differences between the two phonetic systems enables the students to get rid of the negative influence of the national or regional dialect in learning English speech sounds. In this way, they can easily master the sounds common in English and Shandong dialects, distinguish the similar ones and notice those only existing in English. For that purpose, this thesis makes a comparative study of the consonants system of Shandong dialects and that of English so as to predict and correct the common mistakes that the students from Shandong dialects area make when they are studying the English consonants. It also points out another interesting phenomenon, i.e., an excellent mastery of Putonghua (Or, Mandarin) will greatly help the students of Shandong dialects area to solve most of the consonants pronunciation problems they might encounter. Meanwhile, some unique initials existing only in some of the Shandong dialects yet not in Putonghua might be transferred positively to help students to pronounce correctly some consonants in English.