A Survey On Negative Transfer Of Haikou Dialect Upon Junior High School Students’ Acquisition Of English Segmental Phonemes

The linguist A.C.Gimson once pointed out,“To speak any language,a person must know nearly 100%of its phonetics,while only 50%-90%of its grammar and 1%of the vocabulary maybe sufficient.①" This fully illustrates the importance of pronunciation in mastering a language.“The five-level knowledge goals of pronunciation" in the Compulsory Education English Curriculum Standard(2011edition)are described as follows:to understand the significance of pronunciation in language learning;to achieve basic standards of accuracy,naturalness and fluency in pronunciation and intonation in daily conversation;to understand and express different intentions and attitudes through changes of stress and intonation;to spell words according to rules of pronunciation and phonetic symbols②.“The five-level knowledge goals of pronunciation" shows the status of phonetics teaching in junior high schools,which means the importance of studying English pronunciation of junior high students.As the first language that Chinese students come into contact with is their dialects,it is of great significance to study the negative transfer of dialects on English pronunciation acquisition.Based on language transfer theory,contrastive analysis theory and error analysis theory,to begin with,the author compared the similarities and differences among English,Haikou dialect and Mandarin phonetic system through literature reading.Then 75 students and 3 English teachers from 2 junior high schools in Haikou were selected as subjects in order to analyze the segmental phonemes affected by the negative transfer of Haikou dialect in the students’ actual pronunciation.Finally,some students and teachers were interviewed to make up the deficiency of the prior questionnaire and pronunciation test.The results of the questionnaire and interviews show that a large amount of teachers and students reckon that phonetics learning and teaching are important,but most students still do not realize that they or their teachers speak English with an accent.The results of phonological test show that the negative transfer affects the pronunciation of the junior high school students in Haikou dialect area.These affected segmental phonemes can be listed as follows:vowels/i:/,/i/,/e/,/ae/,/(?)/,/u:/,/u/,/(?)/,/(?):/,/α:/;diphthongs/(?)/,/(?)/,/(?)/,/(?)/,/(?)/and consonants/v/,/z/,/θ/,/(?)/,/(?)/,/(?)/,/r/,/(?)/,(?)/,/(?)/,/(?)/.The analysis revealed that there are two reasons for the negative transfer.Firstly,there are some similarities between Haikou dialect and English in acoustical pronunciation.Secondly,there are some similarities between Haikou dialect and English in phonemes.This study puts forward some teaching and learning suggestions to reduce the negative transfer effect of Haikou dialect on English pronunciationThis study has some practical significance,but there are also some limitations expected to be improved in future teaching practice and research.