A Preliminary Study Of The Influence Of Sichuanese On College Freshmen's English Pronunciation

Pronunciation problems among Chinese college students, especially in every vocational college in Sichuan, have constantly been noticed. Sichuanese has its special features in the syllable structures; the students with heavy Sichuan accents have difficulty in making a standard English pronunciation. Although many scholars have done lots of researches on the teaching and learning areas of English pronunciation, the investigation into college freshmen's English pronunciation in Sichuan Province has seldom been touched.This research takes 60 freshmen in Ya'an Vocational College as research subjects and conducts an investigation into their pronunciation problems and factors influencing pronunciation learning by pronunciation tests and questionnaires. The present thesis aims to find out some typical pronunciation problems of Sichuanese, and points out the language negative transfer caused by the influence of Sichuanese.The thesis analyzes the features of those pronunciation problems among the research subjects as well as factors that influence pronunciation learning following Contrastive Analysis, Mother Tongue Transfer theory and Error Analysis. The differences between Chinese and English phonological systems bring difficulties to Chinese students in mastering certain vowels and consonants. Many problems are caused by a negative transfer of Chinese pronunciation over English.The author recommends that a systematic instruction of phonological knowledge should be given to students. In English pronunciation teaching, the teachers are also required to highlight similarities and differences between English and Chinese pronunciation features, particularly some Chinese local dialects, according to which targeted training plans can be made to avoid possible negative influence of mother tongue on the target language pronunciation. Another important thing is to know the causes of errors to make targeted correction rather than mechanical imitation. In a word, it is estimated that this essay can make contribution to our country's English pronunciation teaching and learning, especially to that of Sichuan Province.