The Negative Transfer Of Mother Tongue In Vocational School Students' English Phonetic Learning And Its Revelation To English Teachers' Teaching Methods

It is known that Chinese students have spent much time learning English, but the result is not very satisfactory. Many Chinese students cannot speak English well or have a fluent talk with foreigners even after several years' study in English. Obviously, limited English communication ability is unable to meet demands of the society and economic development, and the pronunciation is the key of English study, it is the difficult point at the same time. Therefore, the foreign language teacher should pay more attention to English phonetics teaching, and make great efforts to improve their teaching methods in order to improve the teaching result.In learning a foreign language, phonetic study is the first and fundamental step in the attempt to master the second language. It is especially when the learning of a second language takes place in the environment of the first language, or the mother tongue. The differences between the first language and the target language usually result in problems and errors in the learning of the target language, especially for the adult foreign language learners. Rod Ellis(2000: 51) thought that mother tongue is one of the main causes of making mistakes during the process of learners studying second language. This kind of influence of mother tongue is the negative transfer of mother tongue over the acquisition of second language. The influence of mother tongue in phonetic learning is the most noticeable one. So in teaching a foreign language, we teachers must make full use of the learners' phonetic coordinate axis and compare the pronunciation and intonation of the two languages involved. Contrastive Study is closely related to foreign language teaching. It helps to discover and explain problems, analyze errors and overcome interference of the mother tongue transfer. Therefore, foreign language teachers and educational experts have attached great importance to Contrastive analysis since Lado used it in teaching. Wang Li(1985: 4) early pointed out that in foreign language teaching "the most effective way is the comparative teaching of the Chinese language and the foreign language". But for many years, English pronunciation teaching has been neglected and the teaching quality is very poor.This thesis explores the theory of phonetics and the theory of transfer in second language learning and deals with negative transfer of mother tongue in segmental and supra-segmental levels to vocational school students when they learn English pronunciation and intonation. By comparing and contrasting the pronunciation and intonation of mother tongue and English, the thesis also discusses in theory the forms and causes of the native language interference in vocational school students' English phonetic learning, explain and predict problems and errors by experiment and investigation etc., and then tries to provide the teaching method to overcome the negative transfer of mother tongue so that we English teachers can predict the difficulties in teaching English pronunciation and intonation and improve the quality of teaching.