Typical English Pronunciation Errors By Middle School Students From Changsha Dialect Areas And Correcting Strategies

In learning the sound system of the second language, the learners are always influenced by the negative transfer because of their pronunciation habits of mother tongue. The interferences of Changsha Dialect have already strongly influenced most of the local students' English acquisition. The author tries to look for the differences between English and Changsha dialect on phonetics, and makes a survey on the local students. According to the survey, it is found that the typical errors mainly manifested the followings: the contrast between the long vowels and the short vowels is not obvious; the deviations occur in oral cavity's opening extent, tongue's position and dual vowels, the contrast between the voiced consonants and the voiceless consonants, pronunciation positions, etc. The author is trying to compile a guidance book to correct typical errors in order to improve the phonetic teaching through the related school-based research and the experimental teaching activities.This thesis consists of six parts.The first chapter is the literature review. The author briefly introduces the formers' research on native language transfer. It discusses the role of the first language (L1 for short) and some relative learning theories, including Behaviorist learning theory and the second language acquisition ( SLA for short).In Chapter Two, the author describes English phonetics system and phonemes, Changsha dialect phonemes and its pronunciation characteristics. Then he analyzes the differences between Changsha dialectal phonemes and English phonemes.In Chapter Three, the author tries to find all of the English vowels and consonants that students from Changsha dialect area often make errors on pronunciation. Through the investigation and recording ( read by participants ), he finds the typical errors caused by the dialect.And in Chapter Four, the author analyzes the questionnaire investigation and sound recording on the statistical data. Next, he works out some correcting strategies and writes the experimental materials.In Conclusion, the author briefly talks about the reasons of the typical errors of English pronunciation from the students' mother tongue Changsha dialect. Then he summarizes the correcting strategies and experimental teaching.