A Study Of Hakka Dialect’s Negative Transfer On English Phonetic Learning

Phonetic learning and teaching plays a fundamental role in successful English acquisition. A good mastery of phonetics can help to build such English skills as listening and speaking. If learners do not have a good command of fluent and standard English pronunciation and intonation, it may affect their interest and confidence in English learning, which will accordingly hinder the buildup of good English linguistic skills and communicative competence. Therefore, in China, phonetic learning and teaching deserves more and more attention in terms of English learning and teaching. However, the differences between mother tongue and target language can cause interference in the acquisition of the target language, that is, negative transfer. To learn a foreign language well, one should attach great importance to the negative transfer towards the learning of English speech sounds from his or her native language and conduct relevant studies to find out corresponding effective teaching strategies to reduce the negative transfer, thus promoting the foreign language learning.China is well known as a multi-ethnic country with many regional dialects. Dialect, the variety of a language, actually is one’s first spoken language, the effects of which may last through all his or her life, especially on one’s language acquisition. Compared with the transfer study of standard Chinese, mandarin on English learning, the study of the impact from dialects on English learning is quite scarce. But there is a growing number of starting the transfer study on dialects and English phonetic learning in order to improve the English teaching and learning in dialect areas.As one of the seven major dialects in China, Hakka dialect in Mei County (Meixian) is the standard form. The Hakkas, as a unique group of’Han’nationality, with a large population, are distributed over a vast area of China, even abroad. According to transfer theory, Hakka students may encounter particular learning difficulties caused by negative transfer of their local dialect on English phonetics. So far, there are a few articles focusing on the theoretical discussion about Hakka transfer from a certain perspective without a comprehensive study. Few, if any, empirical studies have been conducted in this regard. Furthermore, there is not any study on the corresponding effective teaching strategies to decrease the negative transfer. With these tools like questionnaire, oral tests and teaching practice, this research took Hakka students in Meizhou City as subjects to conduct an empirical study with the aim of detailing the negative transfer of Hakka dialect on English phonetics in terms of segmental and supra-segmental aspects and finding the linguistic causes through analyzing subjects’oral mistakes and a contrastive analysis of Hakka and English phonetics. According to the current situation of phonetic teaching in Meizhou region and the linguistic causes, some specific and corresponding teaching strategies have been employed in the study to verify the effectiveness in reducing the negative transfer from Hakka dialect. Thereby, come up with the practical pedagogical implication to improve Hakka students’English phonetic learning.The research has discovered that:1) The negative transfer from Hakka dialect dose exist on the learning of English speech sounds.2) Such negative transfer lies in both the segmental structures as the articulation of certain sounds and the supra-segmental features as English syllables, sentence rhythm and intonation, etc.3) Students’learning of consonants suffers more than that of vowels from the negative effects of Hakka dialect.4) The above negative effects can be weakened more or less with some corresponding teaching strategies like Step Pronounce Method, Sound Contrast Method or Error Correction.