An Empirical Study On The Negative Transfer Of Putian Dialect On Junior High School Students’ English Pronunciation

English as a second language become more and more important in our daily life. However, the second language acquisition does not run smoothly, because of the interference from the mother language. Such an interference is known as ‘negative transfer’.In this thesis, the author relies on questionnaires and phonetic texts to text the students’ pronunciation in Putian area, on the basis of theories, including phonetics theory, transfer theory in second language acquisition and speech contrastive analysis. Thereafter the author compares the sound spectrograms of students’ and standard speech materials by Praat, computer software. With the comparison, the author tries to locate the difficulties of local students in English pronunciation and intonation to identify the causes of these difficulties. According to the data analysis, the author makes the following conclusions:1.students in Putian area always confuse long vowels with short vowels, and they also confuse the essential differences of English vowels and finals of Putian dialect.2.students in Putian area can’t discern exactly the voiced consonants and voiceless consonants, and they always add /?/ to the consonant at the end of a word. At the same time, they always replace English pronunciation with pronunciation of Putian dialect. They also confuse the essential differences of English consonants and initials of Putian dialect. 3. students in Putian area read English sentences with monotonous intonations which goes without ups and downs.Therefore some remedies to address the negative transfer of Putian dialect has been put forward in the conclusion of this thesis.