A Contrastive Study Of Phonological Systems Between English And Mandarin Chinese

Teaching English in China has a long story, and teaching Chinese in foreign countries is a new trend. However, Chinese style English has been a great obstacle to Chinese students and English style Chinese is an educational problem of Chinese teaching. The problems in pronunciation have been the problems demanding prompt solution. A better understanding of differences and similarities in phonological systems of English and Chinese is an essential factor in solving these problems. Contrastive Analysis is a procedure of systematic comparison of L1 and L2 in order to predict areas of greatest learning difficulty expecting to find out the causes of the problems.The comparison of phonological systems of English and Mandarin Chinese is carried out at three levels under the guidance of Constrastive Analysis Hypothesis and Language Transfer Theory. In this sense, the differences of phonological systems of English and Chinese are shown as follows:(1) At the level of segmental phoneme, the differences of English vowels and Mandarin Chinese vowels are mainly shown in categorization, distribution, distinctive features and phonetic value; (2) At the level of syllabic structure, the differences are shown in dimension of syllabic structure, consonant clusters, syllabic consonants, the relationship between inner constituents of a syllable and the different relationship between adjacent syllables; (3) In terms of coarticulation, English coarticulation shows variety in type and Chinese coarticulation shows its particularity in dimension.To sum up, this study is more based on current situation of language teaching, and may be of great practical use and pedagogical significance. On the one hand, it presents the difference and similarity in phonological systems of English and Chinese in a more concrete way expecting to set light on the further study of linguistics and language teaching. On the other hand, the findings would make some contribution to the acquisition and education of language learners and teachers.