A Study On Negative Transfer Of Chinese Pinyin To Students’ English Pronunciation Learning And Related Teaching Strategies In Primary School

Language transfer is considered as one of the important topic of second-language acquisition.From the 1950 s to the late 1970 s,the differences between native and target languages became a major research issue in the field of second-language acquisition and the teaching of a foreign language.The theory of language transfer provides a means for the development of language learning.It includes positive transfer and negative transfer.The former refers to the habits,patterns,and rules of one’s native language that are beneficial to acquiring a second language.The latter refers to the interference of one’s native language when learning a second language.Pronunciation is both the foundation and the cornerstone of language learning.Therefore,for new primary school English learners,laying a solid pronunciation foundation will play a vital role in their future English learning.There is no desirable environment for students to learn English in China.Thus,in the process of learning English,the influence of the native language is inevitable,which makes English learning more challenging.Based on the theory of language transfer,this thesis aims to study the negative transfer of Chinese Pinyin to English pronunciation learning in primary schools and what teaching strategies teachers can use to avoid this negativeThe research has adopted both qualitative and quantitative research methods.The qualitative research covers the literature review on language transfer at home and abroad and the relevant research on pronunciation learning based on the theory of language transfer,while quantitative research involves data collection and analysis by means of questionnaires,tests,and interviews.Taking the Affiliated School of Lanzhou University,at which the author is working,as an example,the author uses 200 students from four third-grade classes as the research subjects and employs questionnaire surveys to understand the influence of Chinese Pinyin on students’ pronunciation learning.The researcher selected six English teachers for interviews to identify the problems in English pronunciation teaching,attempting to determine how to overcome negative transfer to improve the effect of English pronunciation teaching in primary schools.In the process of the teaching experiment,100 students from Classes 3 and 4 were selected as experimental subjects,with Class 4 as the experimental class and Class 3 as the control class.Through the analysis and discussion of the oral tests,combined with the pre-test and post-test results,related teaching strategies are analyzed and discussed.Through the above research methods,the researcher finds that the negative transfer of Chinese Pinyin to English pronunciation learning is mainly reflected in the basic pronunciation of English vowels and consonants,stress,intonation,elision,and other phonetic elements.At the same time,this thesis proposes four teaching strategies that can expected to overcome the negative transfer of Chinese Pinyin to English pronunciation teaching: listening and seeing,the fusion of pronunciation and forms,imitation under different role experience,and giving regular hints.The feasibility and superiority of these teaching strategies are verified by experiments.