Research On Segmental Phoneme Problems And Strategies Of English Learners In Changsha District

Pronunciation learning is an essential part in the process of second language acquisition.The differences between mother tongue and target language often influence the learning of the target language.In the process of learning a new language,the ingrained habit of mother tongue will hinder the development of having new language habit.Meanwhile,the interference of native language with second language is particularly evident in pronunciation.The reason is that different languages have distinctive features of phonemes.Failure in understanding the distinctive features of phonemes in different languages will possibly lead to many errors in pronunciation.As one of China's seven major dialects,Xiang dialect has a wide range of users in Hunan.Among them,Changsha dialect,as the representative of the new Hunan dialect,has a great difference with the pronunciation and phonetic features of English.In this paper,the author taking English learners in Changsha area as an example tries to explore their phonetic problems and to help students acquire the correct pronunciation.The author chose students from Changsha Finace and Economics School as the research objects,because many of whom not only lack enough basic knowledge of English,but also mostly influenced by local dialect accent.At the same time,teachers from secondary vocational schools are relatively weak in phonetics.Many teachers are not aware of the influence of negative transfer from dialect to phonetic acquisition,which results in the vocational school students ineffective acquisition of standard English pronunciation.This paper first compares the similarities and differences of phonemes between Changsha dialect and Received Pronunciation.Then the author use the questionnaire survey,recording test and other methods to explore the phonetic problems of learners and finds out main problems as follows: the contrast between the long vowels and the short vowels is not obvious;the deviations of dual vowels;the contrast between the voiced consonants and the voiceless consonants,etc.After that,the author analyzes the reasons for Changsha English learners' phonetic problems and applies the results to phonetic teaching,which made learners' post test scores have significant improvement comparing with pretest scores.The results of the teaching may provide the effective phonetic teaching method for Chinese EFL learners.Finally,the author offers some advice on the teaching strategies and students' learning methods based on the results of the study,and summarizes the deficiencies of this paper and the areas to be improved.