A Comparative Study On The English Sound Perception And Production Of Middle School Students From Shanghai And Yancheng

When learning the pronunciation or speaking of a second language, the learners tend to be influenced by the negative transfer of the pronunciation habits from their mother tongue. As for most of Chinese students, particularly those from the south, the negative transfer comes from their dialect rather than Putonghua (Standard Chinese). The aim of this research is to account for two questions:First, do students from some different dialectal areas receive the negative transfer of their mother tongue in their English pronunciation? And if so, to what degree are they influenced by this negative transfer? Second, does the negative transfer in the sound perception agree with that of the production?First of all, the author chooses Shanghai dialect and Yancheng dialect for study, comparing their sound systems with that of English; then the author assumes that the oral English of the students from both areas is influenced by the negative transfer of their dialects, and tries to predict the possible errors in their perception as well as production of English sounds. Then a survey and a test are conducted. Two groups of middle school students, one from Shanghai and the other one from Yancheng, of similar age and approximate English proficiency, are chosen as subjects for this study, and they are required to fill out a questionnaire, take a listening test and some of them participate in a pronunciation test afterwards. The results indicate that both groups have been influenced by the negative transfer in both their perception and production, thus making errors in listening and speaking, which can be attributed to the transfer of their respective dialects; however, some predicted errors based on contrastive analysis of the sound systems do not appear actually, and this proves that effective teaching methods can help reduce the negative transfer of the mother tongue. Moreover, the author also makes a correlative analysis between students'sound perception and production scores, and the result shows there is no significant correlation between the two aspects. Therefore, we conclude that Liberman's "Motor Theory" does not apply to Chinese middle school students, and suggest that in teaching English pronunciation, teachers should clearly illustrate how a sound is pronounced, instead of having the students simply learn by listening to the audio materials repeatedly.