An Empirical Research On The Influences Of Yuancheng Accent On The Acquisition Of English Pronunciation

In any language, speech sound is the most important medium in oral communication. Hence, the mastery of English is important for the English learners. However, every language or dialect has its own unique pronunciation system and pronunciation rules. The acquisition of the pronunciation of a foreign language is often influenced by learners’national or regional phonetic system, which is often mentioned as negative transfer. In China, it is a universal phenomenon that most English learners’English pronunciation is influenced by the negative transfer of Chinese pronunciation, especially by the negative transfer of Chinese local accent, and Yuancheng accent is not an exception.Yuancheng dialect, a variety of Hakka dialects, belongs to one of the sub-branches of southern dialects. From linguistic perspective, the consonants and vowels of Yuancheng accent and those of English share similarities, while differences also exist in phonetics. Based on contrastive analysis, this study first describes the phonetic features in segmental systems of Yuancheng accent and English, and then a contrastive analysis of phonetic system between them is followed by the results of a case study, so as to present the findings under the guidance of transfer theory.This study explores the transfer of Yuancheng accent on the senior high school students’acquisition of English sounds by contrasting the different sounds between English and Yuancheng accent. The research was carried out through an experiment designed for50students of senior three, who came from local regions and communicated with their parents with Yuancheng accent at home. A questionnaire survey, an audio tape recording and a face-to-face interview were carried out to collect data. The experiment lists88English common words and a small passage which can include all English vowels and consonants. The participants read the materials one by one and their pronunciations were recorded by Cool Edit Pro software and the data were analyzed by Excel.The result shows that:1) the differences between the pronunciation of Yuancheng accent and English resulted in interference. Firstly, the students used the pronunciation of Yuancheng accent to replace the pronunciation of English. Secondly, owing to their habits of Yuancheng local pronunciation, they failed to distinguish between long and short monophthongs of English. Thirdly, they completely neglected the pronunciation of some English terminal consonants.2) When the pronunciation of Yuancheng accent is similar to the English pronunciation, Yuancheng accent contributes to students’acquisition of English pronunciation.The implication of this research is that transfer of local accent does exist in Yuancheng students’learning of English, hence, in teaching and learning English, more attention should be paid to the differences between Yuancheng local accent and English phonetic system, so as to reduce the negative transfer of local accent on the acquisition of English pronunciation.