Influences Of Hengshui Dialect On English Pronunciation Learning

Pronunciation learning is very important in second language acquisition. However, the basic knowledge of phonetics has been ignored. Pupils in Hebei province begin to learn English in grade three in the primary school. But there is no systematic knowledge of phonetics in the textbooks. Phonetics learning needs not only the phonics imitation method, but also the basic knowledge about phonetics. However, with the influence of quality-oriented education and the western language teaching mode, pronunciation teaching in China tends to use the imitation method and the basic knowledge of phonetics is undervalued. It is worth to notice that English acquisition environment for Chinese students is different from the West. First, English teachers in China are mostly Chinese. Even if there are foreign teachers, the foreigners teaching force is relatively weak. Second, the language surrounding to the students is mainly in Chinese. And students in the oral English class are not active to participate and interact. Moreover, English belongs to Indo-European language system, while Chinese belongs to Sino-Tibetan language system. They belong to different language families and there are many differences in tone, syllable and phoneme. Thus the negative influence of Chinese on the English acquisition is great. Without any basic knowledge of phonetics, the learners will meet lots of difficulties when they learn a new language which is quite different from their mother tongue. Therefore, the Chinese phonetic teaching only relying on the imitation phonics method is premature.This study aims at the practical problems in phonetics teaching. And the basic current situation of English phonetics teaching in Hengshui is summed up by the way of surveys, questionnaires, interviews, statistics analysis, etc. According to the survey results, this thesis analyzes the reasons for bad English pronunciation habits and puts forward some suggestions to deal with this problem. Moreover, this research intends to improve Hengshui English teaching and enhances the level of English pronunciation.There are five chapters in this thesis. The first chapter is the introduction part of the whole thesis. It introduces the background, significance and organization of this thesis. The second chapter is the literature review part, which introduces theories which are used in this thesis, including language transfer theory, contrastive analysis theory, the basic knowledge of experimental phonetics and the phonetics studies in China and abroad. The third chapter is the contrastive analysis of Putonghua initials, Hengshui dialect initials and English consonants. The main method applied in this chapter is language testing. And some suggestions for consonants acquisition by Hengshui English learners are recommended. The forth part is the comparison of Chinese finals and English vowels. The main methods applied in this chapter are recording pronunciations. And the recording results are analyzed by PRAAT software. Based on formant theory, the formant values of Hengshui speakers and native speakers are compared. And the problems of English vowel pronunciation by Hengshui speakers are analyzed. The last chapter summarizes the significance and limitations of this study. Finally some suggestions for Hengshui English phonetics teaching are put forward.