The Research On The Acquisition Of English Fricatives By Chinese EFL Learners In Middle School

Different languages have unique speech sounds, pronunciation rules and phonetic system. In view of the extremely different phonetic characteristics of English and Chinese, the acquisition of English will entail some inevitable hard work, such as the acquiring of fricatives. There are nine fricatives in English and six fricatives in Chinese. Some of them are similar but phonologically different; the others are totally missing from the latter. Thus when Chinese students speak English, the ingrained articulating habit in their mother tongue often comes into serious conflict with the sound system of the target language. They tend to make some mistakes.This thesis is based on language transfer theory, contrastive analysis hypothesis, and speech learning model.30subjects who come from different middle schools of Dalian Development Zone are chosen as research subjects and the author made a series of experiments by recording, perception test and interview. It investigates the common fricative errors made by Chinese EFL learners in middle school, the influence on the acquisition of English fricatives by Putonghua system and learning elements which influence the fricative acquisition of students. The study aims to reflect the reality of English fricative acquisition by Chinese students, discover and conclude their pronunciation mistakes, moreover, find methods to help them to avoid the negative transfer of Mandarin.The research results show the error rates of English fricatives ordered from the most to the least frequency as follows:/h/>/∫/>/z/>/θ/>/(?)/>/s,3/>/v/>/f/. All the errors can be concluded as the following categories:1) substitution errors;2) epenthesis errors;3) lack of frication errors. English fricatives which are similar but phonologically different cause more negative transfers than the ones missing from Chinese phonetic system. The research also shows that phonetic acquisition is closely associated with subject elements (motivation, confidence, strategies and so on) and objective elements (teachers’attitude, teachers’ pronunciation, teaching methods and so on) in learning.This research provides some demonstrations for SLA theories to a certain extent. In the pedagogical level of SLA, it is hoped to draw more attention of teachers and students in China and appeal to the society for the significance of phonetic instruction by researching on English phonetic acquisition. Meanwhile, it also provides some useful and effective advices for teachers and students to overcome negative transfer of the Common speech with English and Chinese comparative studies and phonetic error analysis.