The Negative Transfer Of Chongqing Accent On English Pronunciation For Freshmen From Non-English Major

Phonetics as the most important part in English teaching has always been neglectedin teaching activities. As a result, it may lead to confusion between the standardpronunciation of English and learners’ mother tongue. This kind of confusion aboutphonetics exists from primary school to college. In addition, comparing with theMandarin, Chongqing dialect has its own characteristics in phonetics, so confusionbetween Standard English pronunciation and Chongqing accent is especially obvious inChongqing area. Some experts have done many research on the comparison of speechsound between English and the Mandarin, however, few experts focus their eyes on theinfluence of Chongqing accent on English phonetic learning.The study about the influence of dialect on English learning belongs to transfer inSecond Language Acquisition. And in terms of transfer, it has both positive transfer andnegative transfer. As the negative transfer can be measured in an easier way and thestudy of negative transfer can be the evidence of positive transfer, so this thesis willmainly focus on the negative transfer of Chongqing dialect.In this experiment, the author takes30non-English major freshmen in ChongqingNormal University as research subjects, and made an investigation into their Englishpronunciation problems and an analysis of factors influencing English pronunciationlearning by questionnaires and pronunciation tests. And the research will mainly focuson the following three questions:1) Which English phonemes may be improperly produced due to the negativetransfer of the Chongqing accent in the city of Chongqing?2) What are the English phonemes that are actually transferred by the sounds in thesubjects’ English reading recordings?3) What can be done to improve the English pronunciation and avoid the negativetransfer of Chongqing accent?The author of this thesis holds the opinion that teaching international alphabet oneby one does not make much sense for the beginners of English learning. To avoid thenegative transfer of learners’ mother tongue, teachers should first test out the exact different phonemes or potential difficult phonemes between the target language andlearners’ mother tongue to highlight phonemes in the process of teaching. In a word, theauthor of this essay believes that, by coming up with some feasible suggestions inEnglish teaching of Chongqing area, this study can improve English pronunciationteaching and learning on Chongqing as well as make contribution to our country’sEnglish pronunciation teaching and learning.