A Study Of Cantonese’s Negative Transfer On English Pronunciation And Teaching Strategies

Phonetics teaching is a very important aspect in English learning. Fluent and standard English pronunciation and intonation is necessary for good communication. In English teaching, every effort should be made to overcome the influence that comes from negative transfer. We also should try our best to help the students master the proper way of pronunciation. It is helpful to improve their English communication for the students to master standard pronunciation. The author finds it is hard for the students in the Cantonese dialect region to change the habit of pronouncing because of long-term use of mother tongue. If the improper way of pronunciation cannot be corrected in time, it will make some misunderstanding and obstacles in communication. Therefore, in this paper, the author tries to use the theory of transfer in second language acquisition to guide the English phonetics teaching, and help the students to reduce the influence of negative transfer of the Cantonese dialect on English, so as to master ways to pronounce more accurately.In this research, the author mainly adopts the methods of comparative analysis, literature analysis, questionnaire survey and phonetics test to carry out the experiment and training teaching strategies. In the process of teaching experiment, the author instructs the students to practice by way of step-by-step pronunciation and phonetics comparing. The results of the pretest and posttest have showed that the way of step-by-step pronunciation and phonetics comparing can properly improve English phonetics teaching, and it has obvious effect to overcome English pronunciation errors in the Cantonese dialect region.This paper is divided into six parts.The first part is introduction. The author introduces the research background, purpose, significance and the thesis structure in this part.The next five parts are the main body of the paper. It contains the first chapter to the fifth chapter. The first chapter is the literature review. The author briefly introduces the previous studies on language transfer and the studies of dialect, Cantonese influence on English learning.The second chapter is about the theory. In this part, the author introduces the definition, development and classification of the theory of language transfer, and also introduces some relative theories, mainly about positive transfer, negative transfer, contrastive analysis.In the third chapter, the author mainly tells about the analysis of the impact of the Cantonese on English pronunciation learning through investigation and recording way. Chapter four is about the study of how to overcome the influence of the negative transfer on English phonetics learning. This part is experimental research and the focus of the paper. By analyzing the result of the pretest, the author classified the phonetics that are easily confused. Then, the author teaches phonetics through step-by-step pronunciation and phonetics comparison, and according to the teaching, prepared a handbook to help the students to improve their pronunciation. And the author analyzes the effect of phonetics teaching strategies by comparing the records of pretest and posttest.In Chapter Five, the author tells about the conclusion of the study and by analyzing the experiment, gives some advice on English teaching.