| It is an indisputable fact that English has become a lingua franca in the world.Pronunciation learning,as an important part of English learning,has attracted the attention of scholars at home and abroad.Although many scholars have studied Chinese learners’ acquisition of English phonemes,China is a vast country with many different dialects,and Yiyang Dialect(YYD),as a typical Hunan dialect,has not received enough attention.After comparing YYD with Mandarin and English,it was found that there is a great difference between the lateral and nasal sounds(/l/,/m/,/n/,/η/)in YYD and English.Therefore,the purpose of this study is to investigate the acquisition of the lateral and nasal sounds in the YYD area.The phonetic acquisition consists of two aspects,perception and production.After reading plentiful literature,the thesis intended to study the following three research questions:(1)How accurately do EFL learners in Yiyang dialect area perceive English lateral and nasal sounds?(2)How well do EFL learners in Yiyang dialect area produce English lateral and nasal sounds?(3)What’s the relationship between their perception and production of English lateral and nasal sounds?In this study,five research instruments were designed for 38 high school students from a school in Yiyang dialect district.The participants first filled out a questionnaire about their basic information and attitudes towards pronunciation learning,and then completed a listening task and three production tasks which including reading a word list and a short passage,and having a free conversation,respectively.In general,this study has the following findings:First,in the aspect of perception,the total average error rate of the 38 participants is 41%.The pair /n-η/ poses the most problems for the students with an average error rate of 62.6% and the word-final position is the most problematic position for the students to perceive nasal sounds.However,the most difficult position for the perception of /n-l/ is the word-initial place.Secondly,the high school students in YYD area have trouble in producing the four phonemes,namely /l/,/m/,/n/ and /η/.Comprehensively speaking,the most difficult phoneme for the participants to produce is /η/,closely followed by the phoneme /l/.The most error-prone position of their production is the word-final position.With a deep analysis into the mistakes,the researcher found that the students in YYD area tend to substitute /η/ and /m/ in the word-final position with /n/ and replace /l/ in the word-initial position with /n/.Finally,as to the relationship between the two aspects of acquisition,there is no significantly statistic correlation between the perception and production of lateral and nasal sounds in English.In a nutshell,the students’ performance in the perception of lateral and nasal sounds is worse than that in the production tasks.This paper provides some pedagogical implications for teaching English phonetics in China.Firstly,the school and the teacher should reform the way to teach English by put more emphasis on the phonetic knowledge.The teaching of English phonemes should be paid attention to in every stage of English learning.Secondly,the result from the questionnaire indicates that the students mostly have a low confidence in their oral English production.The emotion-filter hypothesis suggests that the students’ emotional factors are equally important as cognitive factors.Therefore,teachers should adjust their teaching strategies to enhance students’ interest and confidence in phonetic learning.Finally,the teachers should first teach the difference between dialects and the target language so as to strengthen training purposefully and consciously,and thus gradually reduce the interference of the dialects. |
