| Hu Zhuanglin(2002)points out that “Speech is the outer covering of language”.In people’s daily communications,the importance of speech is surely obvious.Additionally,with the more frequencies of international communications,oral English as a part of English teaching in China has been increasingly focused on.However,since there are various Chinese dialects,interference from them would occur during the process of students’ acquiring RP(i.e.Received Pronunciations).This kind of interference is also called negative transfer of dialects.Some scholars have researched the transfer of Chinese dialects to Chinese students’ English pronunciation acquisition.However,from the aspect of dialects causing negative transfer,these previous studies lack of the research on SMD(i.e.Southern Min Dialect)of Xiamen;from the aspect of research subject,it is deficient on junior high school students.Therefore,based on the theories of language transfer,the author compares the vowel systems between SMD and RP English by means of contrastive analysis and launches a study on the negative transfer of SMD to students’ RP English pronunciations by taking junior high school students from J Middle School in Xiamen as an example.The research questions are as following:1.What are the similarities and differences between SMD and RP English in light of vowel systems?2.What are the negative transfer types and causes to RP English vowels spoken by the students who are able to communicate in SMD?3.What enlightenment for the teaching of English pronunciation can we gain from the study on the negative transfer of SMD?According to the above three questions,the researcher selects the class of the middle rank in 2019 first semester’s English midterm examination in each grade as research subjects for questionnaire.Furthermore,according to self-evaluation results among the 3 classes,6 of the students able to communicate in SMD would be selected out for interview,as well as 30 of them speaking RP English with SMD accents for English pronunciation test.The subjects for interview also include 6 junior high school English teachers.The results of English pronunciation test would be analyzed by Praat of Chinese version designed by the scholars Bei Xianming and Xiang Ning.Through the investigation,some conclusions can be drawn: First of all,RP English vowel system is more complex than that of SMD.There is very few samevowels in these two languages while a large proportion are similar or totally different.The similarities and differences could cause the negative transfer of SMD.Secondly,the types of negative transfer to English vowels spoken by those able to communicate in SMD are the position deviations of the tongue and the wrong distributions of sound lengths.Finally,with the research results,several suggestions on English pronunciation teaching will be put forward from the two aspects of educators and learners,hoping to provide references for English pronunciation teaching in different dialect areas in the future. |
