The Influence Of Shaanxi Accents On College Students’Learning Of English Pronunciation

People learn English in order to communicate. British Linguist D.A.Wilkins once mentioned:"Without pronunciation and grammar, people can not express anything." Pronunciation learning is the basic element during students’ English learning process. Only when the speaker makes right pronunciation can the learners fully understand what they say. However, the traditional way of English teaching put more emphasis on the teaching of grammar and vocabulary. The exams in schools test more about the students’ ability of reading and writing. And the teaching of pronunciation is neglected.English learners are easily influenced by their mother tongue while learning English pronunciation. Learners would unconsciously transfer the system of their mother tongue into their second language,(Gui,1987). The influence of learner’s first language on the second language learning is called transfer. The positive influence is always called positive transfer, while the negative influence is named negative transfer. Shaanxi locates in north-western part of China. Accents in the north are the foundations of Chinese Putonghua. The pronunciation system of Shaanxi accents shares some similarities with the pronunciation of Putonghua. English phonemes also share some similarities with Putonghua. This would mislead learners to transfer the pronunciation of their mother tongue to English pronunciation, for example, the students would read/i:/as Chinese "衣",/ai/as Chinese "爱", and read/(?)pl/as/aenpl/, etc.Ninety freshmen English majors from Xi’an Fanyi University participate in the research.30of these participants come from the northern part of Shaanxi,30of them are from central Shaanxi, and another30are from southern part of Shaanxi. Methods of questionnaire, interview, testing and recording as well as classroom-checking are adopted to investigate the pronunciation learning condition of the target group. The research is done in three steps. Firstly, detailed records of the pronunciation learning condition of the students’ from Northern Shaanxi, Central Shaanxi and Southern Shaanxi are gotten through questionnaires and pre-test papers. Secondly, an18-week systematic pronunciation teaching was carried out among the participants during the whole semester. Methods of interviewing, recording and classroom-checking are used to help the author find out the influence of Shaanxi accent on the participants’ English pronunciation learning. Through qualitative analysis, the author delved into transfer phenomenon that the participants have during their pronunciation learning process. For example, there are students who would misread the English pronunciation/θ/and/o/as Chinese pronunciation "s" and "z",/tr/,/dr/as Chinese "出""猪" etc. During the semester of teaching, the author helped students correct their accent-influenced English pronunciation through descriptive strategy and contrastive analysis. For example, when teaching plosive/p/, the author would compare it with the Chinese initial "p" to avoid students’ negative transfer during learning; For students who habitually pronounce/v/as/w/, the author would suggest they transfer the Shaanxi accent " vu""雾" into the learning of/v/. At the last stage of the research, interview and post-test papers are adopted to help collect data. Through comparison and analysis of the data gotten from the research, it is proved that using positive transfer and avoid negative transfer of learners’mother tongue can help their English pronunciation learning.In this thesis, transfer of Shaanxi accent on students’ English pronunciation learning are illustrated and analyzed. Suggestions are also given to specific problems. When learners’ accent shares some similarities with an English phoneme, the learner can make good use of positive transfer. While when there are difference between learners’ accent and phoneme, learners should avoid negative transfer. This thesis tells that teachers should pay attention to the influences of students’ accent on their English pronunciation learning during the teaching process. Teachers should try to help students eradicate their improper pronunciation learning habits if they want to teach more efficiently.