An Analysis Of The Features Of Zaozhuang Dialect Speaker’s Acquisition Of English Segmental Phonemes

Pronunciation learning is of great importance in second language acquisition. As most of Chinese students acquire their local dialects firstly, they are more apt to be affected by the local dialects’ pronunciation. Therefore, it has heuristic significance to explore how the dialects have the negative transfer to pronunciation learning, which is also the important field of the studies of the second language acquisition(SLA) in recent years.For English learners from Shandong province, there are many differences as well as similarities between Shandong dialects and English in the aspect of phonetics. Based on phonetics and transfer theory in SLA, the paper studies the pronunciation features of English learners from Zaozhuang-in southwest area of Shandong province. It adopts the method of contrastive analysis and field investigation, taking Cool Edit and Praat——the softwares of recording and phonetic analysis as research tools and aims to explore the following questions: First, comparing to English phonemes, which pronunciations have the negative transfer caused by the absence of the counterpart in Zaozhuang dialect? Second, in the process of students’ phonetic acquistion, which phonemes are affected by the negative transfer of Zhaozhuang dialect and what’s the reason? Third, through the analysis of negative transfer of Zaozhuang dialect to the acquisition of English segmental phonemes, what teaching suggestions and measures can we get accordingly?The paper investigates 50 senior high students, whose mother tongue is Zaozhuang dialect. It finds out that both the pronuncaition of vowels and consonants are affected by the negative transfer of Zaozhuang dialect in students’ learning process and explores the further reasons for the situation. At last, according to the problems found in this research, some practical suggestions are given to teachers and students in their English pronunciation learning and teaching, so that the English learners in this area can reduce the negative transfer of dialect in the process of acquiring English pronunciation.