The Negative Transfer Of Tengzhou Accent On The Acquisition Of English Segmental Phonemes

Thirty-six English learners from Grade 10,Tengzhou No.1 middle school participated in the present study.Based on the transfer theory in Second Language Acquisition(SLA),using the method of questionnaire and pronunciation test with the aid of the audio editing software Cool Edit Pro and the speech analysis software Praat,this paper explores the negative transfer of Tengzhou accent on the acquisition of the segmental phonemes in English.This paper aims to answer the following two research questions:(1)Whether finals in Tengzhou accent cause negative transfer to learners' acquisition of English vowels?If negative transfer occurs,what are the specific manifestations?(2)Whether initials in Tengzhou accent cause negative transfer to learners' acquisition of English consonants?If negative transfer occurs,what are the specific manifestations?The results show that accent of Tengzhou accent has negative transfer on the acquisition of English vowels.Firstly,for the sounds/(?)/,/(?):/,/(?):/,/aI/and/(?)I/,the position of tongue and the openness of oral cavity deviate significantly.Secondly,local students have no awareness of the duration differences between the long vowels and short vowels.The long vowels are not long enough and short vowels are not short enough.Accent of Tengzhou accent also has negative transfer on the acquisition of English consonants.Firstly,students in Tengzhou like to add some vowels like/(?)/and/(?)/after the sound/p/,/b/,/t/and/d/.Secondly,they use/s/,/z/and/n/in Tengzhou accent to replace/?/,/(?)/and/(?)/in English respectively.Thirdly,some sounds like/n/and dark/(?)/are usually omitted by the local students.The findings of this paper are beneficial for English teachers to implement effective phonetic teaching methods according to the characteristics of students in Tengzhou area,so as to promote the improvement of students' overall English phonetic level.Meanwhile,the findings are beneficial to correct students' attitude towards English phonetics and improve their learning methods.