Negative Transfer Of Changsha Dialect On The Local Junior School Students' English Listening: An Empirical Study

Among the four basic skills, listening is undoubtedly extremely important, especially for junior middle school students, in that it comes before speaking, reading and writing in the development of communicative skills. However, as the least explicit course, listening is a crux of matter in learning and teaching, attracting a lot of attention in both teaching and researching fields. Experts both at home and abroad have also studied the phonetic disturbance caused by negative transfer of dialects in foreign language learners'English listening learning.Based on the theories of language transfer theory, the bottom-up and top-down listening models, and error analysis in second language acquisition, the author of this thesis tries to demonstrate the feasibility of improving junior middle school students'English listening by decreasing the negative transfer of the local dialect, with a case study of Changsha dialect.The author starts from the present listening learning errors under the local learners' specific learning circumstances, and the root of wrong pronunciations. The causes for these errors are then analyzed from the aspect of a phonetic contrast of English and Changsha dialect.With the empirical study, the research attempts to answer the following two questions:1. Is listening teaching by decreasing negative transfer of Changsha dialect in various teaching methods more effective than listening teaching without the comparison between English and the dialect?2. Can learners'listening ability be improved significantly through decreasing the negative transfer of Changsha dialect?In order to study the effects of teaching listening through decreasing the negative transfer of Changsha dialect, the author conducted a teaching experiment among 98 Junior One students in Hunan Experimental Middle School in Changsha from March to July in 2010. The students from two classes (49 for each class) took this twenty-week experiment. The difference lay in the fact that the experimental class had well-planned listening classes with various classroom activities aiming at decreasing the negative transfer of Changsha dialect; while the control class used the textbook-based listening materials and tasks listed in the textbook. The data of the research were collected by analyzing the questionnaire, a pre-test and a post-test of listening, and were precisely and concretely analyzed by the software of Origin 8.0 and Microsoft Excel.From the data analysis of the experiment, we can conclude that listening teaching by decreasing negative transfer of Changsha dialect is effective and that learners can improve their listening abilities through decreasing the negative transfer of Changsha dialect.