An Experimental Study On Learners'acquisition Of English Vowels In Fuzhou Dialectal Area

There are many studies revealing how Chinese dialects influence the second language phonetic acquisition.However,it's still blank for Fuzhou dialect in this field.Fuzhou dialect belongs to Min dialects.It's one of the main dialects in China which is important in Fujian Province.This research mainly studies three questions based on the acquisition situation of English vowels by learners in Fuzhou dialectal area.First,how English learners in Fuzhou dialectal area perform in English vowel pronunciation? Second,does Fuzhou dialect bring language transfer for learners' English phonetic acquisition? Third,what enlightenment and suggestions of teaching and acquiring can these transfer bring us?This research compares the vowel system of Fuzhou dialect and American English to provide relevant suggestions by selecting 8 representative English monophthongs as the research objects,adopting quantitative and qualitative research methods and analyzing from the aspect of acoustics on the basis of the Transfer Theory.In the meantime,this research provides theoretical explanation and suggestions of teaching and learning according to learners' pronunciation features.The vowel pronunciation of 10 English learners and 10 American native speakers is represented by /?/,/i/,/u/,/?/,/?/,/?/,/?/,/?/.The learners' errors are obtained by applying the acoustic software Praat to analyze the sound recordings.The situation of transfer is analyzed by observing vowels' distribution plot which is based on the data.And the results of contrastive analysis show that Fuzhou learners acquire /i/ and /?/ well,but they have errors in pronouncing /?/,/u/,/?/,/?/,/?/,/?/.On the aspect of transfer,the dialect brings positive transfer for /i/,while negative transfer for /?/,/u/,/?/,/?/.According to the result,this research provides teaching and learning suggestions for teachers and students in this area.English teachers should grasp the students' whole tendency of pronunciation and make strategies based on specific teaching aim.What's more,teachers should take the advantage of computer technology to overcome the negative transfer brought by similar sound in Fuzhou dialect and pay attention to the practicing of listening,which promotes production by perception.For learners,they should realize the importance of learning pronunciation.It's better for them to start from listening skills so as to improve the ability of distinguishing.Then,they should work as teams and practice by imitation to acquire further.