Phonemes Of Qingshuihe Dialect And English RP:a Comparison And Its Application In Junior High School Students’ English Pronunciation Learning

It is mostly certain that one’s native tongue would influence the acquisition of target language in SLA. The sound system of one’s native language is actually a set of deep-rooted pronunciation habits while learning a foreign language is to cultivate a new habit. In acquiring the target language learners often carry the old way of pronunciation to the utterance of the target language. In China, negative transfer of mother tongue speech is a common problem the learners confront in their English speech sound learning.Comparison is a basic research approach for linguistics. Contrastive Analysis is recognized as an effective approach to FLT, especially on the phonetic and phonological levels. This approach has been applied in the phonetic teaching and phonetic books written by many scholars for a long time. The study of the similarities and differences between Chinese and English speech sounds has been an important constituent part in the contrastive study of Chinese-English languages in China since the 1930s. These research findings are of great help to TEFL in China, especially, they offer great convenience for Chinese students to acquire English pronunciation and intonation better. China has numerous dialects, and the contrastive study of Chinese-English languages is mainly between English and mandarin, or English and main dialects. Qingshuihe dialect the present thesis involved belongs to Jin dialect, which is one of major dialects in China. Qingshuihe dialect is on the whole close to Jin dialect, but it has its own uniqueness. In preparation for writing this thesis, the present author found that there were fewer studies ever on the comparison of English and Jin dialect in terms of speech sounds. Meanwhile, the contrastive study of English and Qingshuihe dialect in terms of speech sounds has not been studied. Therefore, the contrastive study of English and Qingshuihe dialect, from the aspect of segmental phoneme, is highly needed.The present study first tries to make a contrastive analysis of phonemic systems of English RP and Qingshuihe dialect, in an attempt to explore the similarities and differences of the phonemic systems of English and Qingshuihe dialect. The study results show that obvious similarities and differences exist in the two phonemic systems in terms of consonant phonemes and vowel phonemes. What follows is an empirical research, which is carried out through an experiment designed for local 60 second-year junior high school students, attempts to see whether the findings of the contrastive analysis would help the Qingshuihe learners with their acquisition of English sounds and lessen the impact of negative transfer of dialectal phonemes.The result of the experiment shows that students from the Experimental Group, namely, the students who acquire English pronunciation through the way of contrastive teaching, can better minimize the negative transfer of mother tongue, and overcome the interference of local dialects and improve their English pronunciation.