The Negative Transfer Of Kunming Dialect’s Accent On The Acquisition Of RP English Pronunciation

Pronunciation is an essential medium in oral communication and it plays a very important role in English learning. As for Kunming local students, English is to be learned as a foreign language. However, English and Kunming dialect have their own phonetic systems and characteristics of pronunciation. Kunming dialect may have facilitation effects on English pronunciation learning when there are some similarities between the two languages, but it may also create some inhibition effects when the differences of the two languages exist. We call the facilitation effect as positive transfer and the inhibition effect as negative transfer.Kunming dialect belongs to southwest mandarin which is a sub-branch of northern dialect. Numerous differences exist between Kunming dialect and RP (Received Pronunciation) English. Large number of EFL learners could be influenced by the phonetic system of their native language. Due to the differences between RP English and Kunming dialect, it will make some interference which may result in negative transfer on the acquisition of RP English pronunciation.This study is with the objectives of (a) identifying the characteristics of Kunming dialect and English; (b) finding out the differences between English and Kunming dialect sounds and (c) finding out how Kunming dialect influences RP English pronunciation from the perspective of negative transfer.Based on the language transfer theory and through contrastive analysis, this thesis explores the negative transfer of Kunming dialect on the acquisition of RP English pronunciation.The research is conducted by taking 46 Kunming local non-English major freshmen in Yunnan Normal University as research subjects. Through the questionnaire, voice-recording and face-to-face interview, the data was collected and then be analyzed. The recorded voices of the subjects have been analyzed by PRAAT software.According to the analysis of the data collected, it is found that there are several pronunciation errors made by the students in their English pronunciation. The errors can mainly be divided into errors in vowels and errors in consonants. Errors in vowels are mainly caused by (a) substituting by using the similar English sound, (b) absence of the sounds in Kunming dialect, (c) pronunciation habit; errors in consonants are caused by (a) substituting the absent sounds by using similar English sounds, (b) substituting the absent sounds by using Kunming dialect’s initials, (c) pronunciation habits, meanwhile the potential reasons for these errors were then discussed.Through the analysis of the negative transfer of Kunming dialect on the acquisition of RP English pronunciation, some feasible countermeasures of Kunming dialect holders in English pronunciation learning were put forward, which included the suggestions for both students and teachers:(a) to describe the negative transfer of Kunming dialect to RP English pronunciation, (b) to enhance the students’ awareness of the negative transfer, (c) to systematically correct the students’ errors in English pronunciation. Thus the results of this study could do some help to Kunming students for them to be aware of their problems in the acquisition of RP, so as to effectively reduce and minimize the negative transfer of Kunming dialect in their learning process and teachers may get some reference to enhance the quality of English pronunciation teaching.