On English Phonetic Teaching In Light Of Language Transfer Theory

As one of the most important aspects of English teaching, phonetic teaching is crucial for English learners in that fluent and standard pronunciation and intonation would lay solid foundation for a better communication. Nevertheless, English phonetic teaching has been receiving low attention compared with other aspects of English teaching for a long time. Take Shaanxi province as an example, students start to learn English in Grade 3 of the primary school, but there is no phonetic knowledge in their textbooks and English teachers pay little attention to students'pronunciation. Besides, during the course of phonetic learning, students subject to the interference of their dialects. They tend to apply the learning habit of their dialect into English speech, as is testified by many scholars and linguists. It is particularly true in the rural area like Wubu, the target case of this study. Located in the northern part of Shaanxi province, Wubu is poor in education due to its relatively weak economy. Students communicate with each other in Wubu dialect every day, and even the teachers use Wubu dialect to have classes. In the author's teaching practice, the author found many problems existing in the English speech sound of Wubu students for they are greatly influenced by their dialect.Therefore, in order to help English teachers minimize the negative transfers on English phonetic learning caused by Wubu dialect by leading students to master the correct manner of articulation, thus preparing well for the training for a better communication in English, based on the theory of language transfer the author dedicated to the exploration of the reasons behind the phenomena and effective means of phonetic teaching to enable students in Wubu dialect area to speak more standard English with the supplementation of the methods of contrastive analysis and error analysis. During the course of the research, the author employed a questionnaire survey, oral tests and teaching practice to conduct a comprehensive research in which a full-scale picture of Wubu students' English speech sounds through the questionnaire and tests were presented; then the deep reasons behind were offered through an elaborative analysis of the data collected from the questionnaire and the pre-test; and after that the author put forward some corresponding teaching strategies and applied them into the teaching practice and received a satisfactory result. With all these work done, major findings as follows were drawn:1. Students in Wubu have a relatively positive attitude towards phonetic learning but their consciousness of the negative transfers from Wubu dialect is quite weak, so most of their English phonetic learning situations are not so satisfactory; 2. Negative transfers from Wubu dialect towards English occur not only in the segmental level, but also the supra-segmental level. In terms of segmental level, Wubu students suffer more negative transfers in consonants than in vowels; 3. Some effective teaching methods could help to mitigate the negative transfers from Wubu dialect.Based on the major findings, some practical implications were concluded. First, systematic English phonetic teaching is quite necessary in the middle school for a better grasp of English speech sounds; then it's important for teachers to create more opportunities for students to touch the authentic English speech. The more frequently students are exposed to English, the more accurate and fluent English they would get; Finally, the comparisons between English speech sounds and Wubu dialect need to be stressed by the English teachers to overcome the negative transfers and utilize the positive transfers.