Research On Negative Transfer Phenomenon Of Inner Mongolian Western Dialect To The Acquisition Of English Pronunciation

Pronunciation is a key element in a second language learning process which is referred to the soul of a language. Different sounds and tones can express various meanings and emotions in communication, so the development of written language must be based on the oral language which is signified by the pronunciation. Acquisition of Pronunciation is the basic and important aspect in second language learning. Nowadays, Chinese students begin to learn English at far younger age than before, thus their pronunciation learning is largely influenced by Chinese. Some influences are positive; others are negative which are more obvious in pronunciation acquisition. In linguistic field, First language transfer in linguistic field is a popular topic especially the research of Chinese EFL learners.Compared with mandarin, Inner Mongolia western dialect owns its special characters. With the purpose of helping local students to improve their pronunciation, the thesis is doing research on and attempts to analyze the errors of pronunciation that students make from segmental and suprasegmental features to find out how the Inner Mongolia Western dialect influences the second language pronunciation learning. Specifically speaking, the thesis is researching the Inner Mongolian western dialect interference in English pronunciation acquisition. So as to prove the negative transfer of mother tongue, the author provides some suggestions to reduce the interference at the least degree.The research is carried out through a questionnaire and a pronunciation test which are designed for 51 students who come from the western part of Inner Mongolia. Students'sounds are recorded by Cooledit software and the data is analyzed by Excel software.The questionnaire is to find out students' attitude toward pronunciation learning, frequency of using local accents, difficulties in pronunciation learning, and methods of pronunciation learning and so on. It is found from the questionnaire that all students agree that pronunciation learning is very important and more frequent they use local accent, more mistakes they make.The pronunciation test consists of seven parts, including word syllables, phonetic symbols, vowels, consonants, stress, rhythm and intonation. It is found from the test that 1) Students' phonology knowledge is not complete and this shortcoming will influence their learning process of pronunciation. 2) The mistakes students made mostly are caused by the local accent.Based on the theory of first language transfer, contrastive analysis and error analysis were carried out in this research. The findings of the research show the errors students make and difficulties they have, then the author concludes the reasons by contrasting the differences of English, Mandarin and Inner Mongolia western dialect in order to find out the negative influence of local accent. This research makes up the blank research field of local accent transfer to pronunciation learning of Chinese EFL students in Inner Mongolia. The problems of the students in this research are not predicted by the teacher but the real ones by doing research and analyzing the audio data.