Negative Transfer Of The Hakka Dialect On English Phonetic Learning

According to the theory of the second language acquisition,the negative influence of the learner's mother tongue on the acquisition of the target language is quite common,especially on the acquisition of pronunciation.In other words,the learner's mother tongue plays a role that should not be ignored in the course of second language acquisition.Besides,as the medium of communication,pronunciation will surely affect the carry out of the communicative activities.Therefore,in order to communicate with others fluently in second language,one must eliminate the negative impact of the mother tongue first.As for most Chinese students,dialect is their mother tongue while English is the second language.In this case,quite a few Chinese scholars have done researches on the influence of negative transfer of different dialects on English phonetic learning,but so far,there is still no body that has done any investigation on the negative effects of Ruijin dialect which is a branch of Hakka dialect on English pronunciation acquisition.Based on this phenomenon,and under the guidance of language transfer theory,the author of this thesis makes a careful comparison between English sound system and Ruijin Hakka dialect sound system to predict the phonetic errors that may occur because of the negative transfer from the dialect.After that,the author validates the predictions and gains further information about the negative transfer of the Ruijin Hakka dialect on English phonetic learning by implementing questionnaire,interview and phonetic testing etc.In addition,the author also proposes some teaching approaches to overcome the negative transfer of the Hakka dialect,in the hope of improving the quality of English phonetic teaching in this dialect area and providing references for other dialect areas.This thesis falls into six chapters which follows the structure of problem discovering,problem investigating,problem analyzing and problem solving.It starts with the introduction of the background,status,methods and significance of the research,followed by the presentation of theoretical basis.After that is the comparison and analysis between English and Ruijin Hakka dialect sound system andempirical researches on negative transfer from Hakka to English phonetic learning.Then comes the effective teaching methods that can help the English learners reduce the negative transfer of Hakka dialect.At last,the thesis ends with the main findings and limitations of the research.