The Negative Transfer of Xi’an Dialect on Middle—school Students’ English Pronun

【摘要】 To some extent， most of my students are affected by the habits of their local mandarin pronunciation when they are learning the second foreign language like English. They always transfer the Xi’an dialect pronunciation to the second foreign language unconsciously.

【关键词】 Students English Pronunciation

【中图分类号】 G633.41 【文献标识码】 A 【文章编号】 1674-4772（2014）01-103-01

As a middle school English teacher， how can I take precautions against local dialect negative transfer and how to transform it during foreign language acquisition efficiently？ These are some common problems and analyses in the pronunciation drills from our students during the teaching procedure as follows.

1. Problems in Pronouncing Segmental Phonemes

Different languages have different phonemics systems. They really have true linguistic universals and near universals in all of the languages. We should build an awareness of the differences between the new and the native language to help our students to realize which of their native language speech habits can be transferred to the foreign language and which can not.

2. Pronunciation Problem on Suprasegmental Analysis

Suprasegmental contrast is particularly critical when moving from a non-tonal language like English， in which pitch changes indicate attitudinal and emotional expression， to a tonal language like Xi’an dialect in which changes in its intonation and pitch mark phonemic differences.

2.1 Analysis in Stress

The beginning learners usually tend to stress each syllable when pronouncing an English word and stress each word when reading an English sentence. For example， they usually pronounce greenhouse ['ɡri nha s] as ['ɡri n'ha s]， blackboard ['bl kb d] as ['bl k'b d]. And because in their native speech each word is read with almost equal stress without syllable stress， they tend to stress each word in a sentence.

2.2 Analysis in Intonation

Both Xi’an dialect and English have tones， but there are differences in the functions of the tones between these two kinds of languages. In a tone language such as our mother tongue， the tone system is a whole part of the vocabulary. These are four tones in Chinese. English is quite different in this respect. The English tones are used according to the contexts. The function of them is at the level of utterances instead of at lexical level as in Chinese. Students should know a certain tone in English expresses a certain meaning or attitude and arbitrarily using tones is not accepted when speaking English.

3. From the above problems and analyses I should find some effective ways to help my students and give some learning methods to them：

（1）Improve the phonetic learning and set up the clear studying plan and aims. Write down these mistakes and confusions in advance to explain deeply for our students to compare with the different English pronunciation. Help our students to sort the distinction and relation among these problems with the ways of handling mother tongue language teaching so as to promote its positive transfer.

（2）Be creative in improving my teaching skills， teaching contents and evaluation methods. Let’s do more nursery rhymes， tales， tongue twister， jokes， riddles and songs in English include some examples from our text books. And our students also can make a preparation after class depending on their own mind.

（3） Master the basic articulation rules during the foreign language acquisition like long vowels， short vowels， voiced sounds and voiceless sounds. We couldn’t find any phonemes in the native language. We also can adopt the comparison and contrast on local speech and the foreign one.

4. Conclusion

To erase these problems all is impossible， but in practice negative transfer does reduce with the increase in the learner’s proficiency in the target language. Imitation is necessary and efficiency； and the phonetic knowledge as well as some phonological rules should be learned systematically which will be helpful to reduce the errors that they will make.

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