Negative Transfer Of The Southwest Shandong Dialect On High Schoolers' English

Oral English teaching has developed rapidly in China in recent years, and increasing attention is being paid to the influence of Chinese on English pronunciation. One's native language and dialect sound system is actually a set of deep-rooted pronunciation habits; while learning a foreign language is to cultivate a new habit. Learners, especially adult learners, often compare the English sounds with those similar ones in their native language and regional dialects when learning English, and will inevitably be affected by the native language and their dialect speech in varying degrees.Theoretically speaking, the influence of Chinese and dialect pronunciation on learners' English is the result of language transfer, which is mainly reflected on levels of pronunciation, vocabulary, sentence and discourse. Unlike the other three levels, transfer in pronunciation had better be studied by taking the distinctive dialect features in different regions into consideration. Chinese learners generally encounter similar problems when acquiring the English pronunciation; yet for students coming from different dialect regions, they will probably meet with some particular difficulties apart from the common ones due to distinctions in dialect speech features. Therefore, studies on phonetic transfer should not be confined to general comparison between Chinese and English, but to take particular dialect features into consideration to provide more specific and effective suggestions for teaching.This thesis explores the negative transfer of the southwest Shandong dialect (SWSD Dialect) sounds in high schoolers' English pronunciation acquisition from the perspective of Phonetics and transfer theory. The research questions are:(1) Which English phonemes may be improperly produced due to the negative transfer of the SWSD Dialect sounds? (2) What are the English phonemes that are actually transferred by the SWSD Dialect sounds in the subjects'oral English recordings? (3) What can be done to improve the English pronunciation of learners in the southwest region of Shandong province (the SWSD Region)?The research procedure is composed of three steps, namely, comparative analysis, recording survey and the interview. First, the author analyzes the potentially transferred sounds by comparing the Chinese and English phoneme systems, as well as the deviated sounds in Jining, Zaozhuang and Heze in the southwest Shandong province. Based on the analysis, a study is made on the recordings of 54 high schoolers' English speech in the SWSD Region, and the actually transferred sounds in learners' oral English are justified and confirmed. Finally, the author conducts an interview towards 20 sampled subjects to check the learners' awareness of negative transfer from their native language and dialect speech.The result of the study shows that high schoolers in the SWSD Region often encounter difficulties in the acquisition of the following English phonemes:/(?)/,/n/,/v/,/θ/,/(?)/,/∫/,/(?)/, /r/,/t∫/, /d(?)/,/i/,/i(?)/,/e/,/(?)/,/Λ/,/u/,/ei/,/ai/,/(?)i/,/au/,/(?)u/. This is mainly due to the negative transfer of their dialect sound features, More specifically, they tend to replace some English phonemes with the similar ones in their regional dialect, confuse similar English phonemes like monophthongs with diphthongs and long vowels with short vowels, and add or insert a vowel sound after a consonant or between consonant clusters. Interview also shows that the subjects are not much aware of the problems and their causes.The study indicates that it is necessary to compare and explain the different places and manners of articulation of Chinese sounds with those of the English ones when teaching English pronunciation to learners in a certain region. Teachers avoid allocating the same amount of time on the instruction of each phoneme in class. Instead, more efforts should be made on the explanation and correction of difficult phonemes. The teachers can greatly improve teaching quality and help enhance learners' spoken English by seeking to overcome negative transfer.