Toward A Systemic Strategy For Managing Chinese Phonetic Transfer In The Teaching Of EFL Speaking In The Elementary School

In the recent years,with the overall progress of foreign language teaching practice,China's primary school EFL speaking(including phonetics or phonology)teaching has made remarkable progress,greatly improving the fluency of students' speaking.So far,however,it still suffers from a lack of systemic Chinese phonetics management strategies,and insufficient accuracy of students' speaking.Meanwhile,with the steady growth of second language acquisition research,the study of first language transfer has also made much progress,gaining significant insights into language transfer.Up to now,however,it is still handicapped by a lack of systemic guidelines,bases,methods and procedures,and failure to develop systemic management strategies.In view of these problems,this study aims to develop and verify a systemic strategy for managing Chinese phonetic transfer in primary school EFL speaking teaching through an integrated methodology of theoretical exploration and empirical verification.Firstly,this study devises a systemic strategy for managing positive and negative Chinese phonetic transfer in primary school EFL speaking teaching on the levels of view,theory,method and procedure through a theoretical exploration integrating deduction and induction,employing dialectical systemic thinking as guideline and framework,on the complementary basis of behaviorist and constructivist theories of language learning and relevant concepts of language,and incorporating findings from relevant studies.The proposed strategy system comprises a systemic meta-strategy and a set of Chinese phonetic transfer management strategies.The meta-strategy is a strategy based on dialectical systemic thinking for managing Chinese phonetic transfer management strategies.The set of Chinese phonetic transfer management strategies chiefly include strategies for managing the socio-cultural environment,context of situation(input and interaction),psychological states,cognitive backgrounds,and English and Chinese phonetics in primary school students' EFL speaking learning.Secondly,the present study verifies the effects of the proposed strategy through an experiment involving quantitative and qualitative techniques,selecting as participants 120 fourth year students from two classes of two primary schools in a town in Shandong province,designing two English speaking(phonetic)tests as instruments of data collection and Excel2016 as instrument of data analysis,and through a procedure of pre-testing,1-semester(about 4 months)of strategy implementation,and post-testing.Results of the experiment demonstrate that the formulated strategy can effectively reduce the negative transfer and increase the positive transfer of Chinese phonetic features in primary school students' speaking learning.Hopefully,this study is practically meaningful to primary school EFL speaking teaching in that the developed strategy may help to solve the problems of lacking systemic Chinese phonetics management strategies and insufficient accuracy of students' speaking.It is also academically significant to language transfer studies as its methodology may help to solve the problems of inadequate systemicity in language transfer research guideline,basis,method and procedure.