A Deviation Analysis On English Vowel Pronunciation By Chinese English Teachers

A prerequisite for successful communication is intelligible and clear pronunciation,and therefore,pronunciation acquisition plays an important role in second language acquisition.In the process of second language acquisition,the learners are likely to be affected by the transfer of their native language in many aspects,especially the dialectal transfer in pronunciation acquisition.Besides,English teachers play an indispensable part in second language acquisition of the students,and their phonetic knowledge of the second language greatly influences second language pronunciation acquisition of their students.Hence,it is of positive and practical significance to explore the problem of English teachers’ second language pronunciation acquisition from the perspective of dialectal transfer.This thesis focuses on English vowel pronunciation of ten Zaozhuang English teachers,bases on the theories of second language acquisition such as language transfer and contrastive analysis,and also on some phonetic theories,including the phonetic system of RP and Zaozhuang dialect.By applying the field investigation method,literature research method as well as data analysis method and using the audio editing software Adobe Audition CS6 and the speech sound analysis software Praat,this thesis aims to explore the following questions:Firstly,what are the acoustic features of English vowels of English teachers who speak Zaozhuang dialect? Secondly,what are the differences of the acoustic features between RP and Zaozhuang English teachers? Thirdly,for Zaozhuang English teachers,what are the hardest and the easiest vowels to acquire,and what are the reasons for their pronunciation deviation?The contrastive analysis on the acoustic features between RP and the ten Zaozhuang English teachers shows that the negative transfer of Zaozhuang dialect on the production of English vowels mainly exists in the height of the tongue,the position of the tongue,the lip posture,the time duration of the vowels and the confusion of monophthongs and diphthongs.The causes can be divided into thevacancy of the phonemes in Zaozhuang dialect,incomplete correspondence of the phonemes in Zaozhuang dialect as well as the lack of phonetic awareness.In response to these phenomena and causes,this thesis puts forward some effective and feasible pedagogical implications for learning and teaching RP English and for English teachers’ self-improvement,so as to reduce the negative transfer of local dialect on Zaozhuang English teachers’ English pronunciation acquisition.