The Effect Of Perceived Distance On Uyghur Students' Perception Of English Phoneme

Transfer is always an accompaniment of third language acquisition. Fries, Lado and other researchers believed that transfer results from linguistic distance. However, Kellerman's series of studies have proved that linguistic distance by learners'subjective consciousness, the perceived distance, plays a much more important role in transfer than objective linguistic distance Therefore, the perceived distance is one of the most important effective factors in muti-language acquisition. In the past, most of the studies focused on the transfer of meaning and grammar, with very few researches on phoneme, and no study is on the influence of perceived distance in Uyghur students'English learning. In the practice of English teaching, the author found that Uyghur students experience more difficulties in English listening than Han students. The investigation of students'listening difficulties indicates most of the Uyghur students had more difficulties at perception stage than at other stages. The author made a bold guesses that the difficulties of listening at perception stage might be related to perceived distance. Based on the theories of third language acquisition, perceived distance and language transfer, the present study intended to find out the influence of Uyghur and Chinese on Uyghur students'perception of English phoneme.This study aims to answer the following questions: (1) When Uyghur students learn English phonemes, which language is the source of language transfer, Uyghur or Chinese? (2)Are there more influences from perceived distance than linguistic distance in Uyghur students'English phonetics learning? And what are different perceived distances among different English proficiencies? (3) Can the perceived distance decide the transferability of target language to Uyghur learner judgment? (4) Is there avoided learning some phoneme when the Uyghur students are affected by perceived distance? Pure vowel /e/ and diphthong /ei/ are a pair of phonemes to be tested. The reason why these two phonemes are chosen is the linguistic distance of vowels /e/ between Uyghur and English is similar to the linguistic distance of diphthong /ei/ between Chinese and English. 60 Uyghur students of non-English majors were selected as participants in this study, an all of them are from Northwest Normal University, meanwhile, and 40 Uyghur students were from a Uyghur preparatory class, others were sophomores from six minority classes. Phoneme discrimination test between /e/ and /ei/, core–noncore dimensions judgment, the transferability judgment, and acceptability judgment are applied to the subjects to collect data. The results indicate that most of the students are used to transferring phoneme from L1; there are shorter perceive distance form Uyghur to English than Chinese to English for Uyghur students; and perceived transfer can reflect perceive distance; but perceived distance have not led students just to accept a phonetic from native language, and unaccepted the phonic from Chinese. Meanwhile, the researches about different English proficiencies have represented that the effect of perceive distance can be reduced and proceed to linguistic distance with improving English levelThe results of the present study are significant for the relationship between transfer and perceived distance. The author suggests that English teachers can make use of contrastive analysis, phonetic awareness一raising, and multimedia equipment in English phonetic teaching to help students know linguistic distance among L1, L2 and L3 to prevent the negative transfers of perceived distance.Although the researcher has made great efforts to ensure the objectivity and validity of the study, the reported study here was also subject to some limitation, e.g. the sample size of the subjects in the present study is not big enough; the tested phonemes are less; age, stress, environment, comprehension have been ignored by author in study, they could affect the accuracy of data. In the future, the author will try to fill up these deficiencies in study, and hope other researchers pay more attention to the study of perceived distance from other monitory. Meanwhile, the effects of perceived distance are not only restricting in transfer of phonic and meaning, so the study of many aspects and angles will be a key point.