The Negative Transfer of Mother Tongue on English Pronunciation——from the Phonetic and Phonological Perspectives

Language researchers have long been working on the language transfer theory since 1970s with an aim to help second language acquisition. Researches on transfer of pronunciation were explored from many aspects, such as phonetics, age, motivation and culture etc. By illustrating the Chinese learners’ improper English pronunciation, it tries to discuss the negative transfer of their mother tongue on the English pronunciation on the theoretical basis of phonetic and phonological differences between the two languages. Based on these studies and analysis, it hopes to arouse the learners’ awareness of the different pronunciation between English and Chinese and their interests in acquiring a native-like pronunciation, and hopefully the teachers will also help the learners have a good knowledge of the difference before they’re affected by the negative transfer of Chinese.     

TEACHING ENGLISH PTONUNCIATION LN AN LNTERESTING MOTIVATING AND EFFECTIVE WAY

<正>Prounclatlon is the essence of any language for language begins withsounds,and is used in oral speech and in reding aloud In order to makeoneself intelligible one must first learn the pronunciation of a languageand English is no exception.However,English pronunciation is beingneglected or even ignored in some schools.Thus many students graduate withpoor Englisn pronunciation.Instead of using the phonetic symbols;thestudents mark English words with Chinese characters,for esanple,“fish”and”费事”,“seven”as”散义”.”good.morning”as“古得猫宁”,“lesson”as“来森”etc,andsome even mark whole texts in this way which sounds rather strange andleaves you unsure whether to laugh or cry Therefore,students with poorpronunciation either have great difficulties finding jobs or areunqualified for the jobs they obtain.     

Social Differences and English Varieties

We may simply say language is a tool for human communication with respect of its function.But from asociolinguistic point of view,language is influenced not only by the speech situation but also by the socialvariation,such as class,professional status,age and sex.In English,we could still find some usages invocabulary,grammar and pronunciation which are influenced by the above factors.A.Sex varietiesDifferences exist in the speech of men and women in most countries.It is believed that speech…     

The Influence of Mandarin and WMD over English Pronunciation

Applied Linguistics requests to research the foreign language teaching by using contrastive and error analysis (Zhang, 2001, p.13). English voice system includes 46 vowels and consonants phonemes. During the study process, accents are mainly caused by students who view the target language phoneme system and mother tongue phoneme tongue system equally, so it is necessary for us to tell the target language from mother tongue in systems, so that students can be preaware of their own mistakes in pronunciation (Zhang, 2001, p.16). When the practical problems encountered, students can find the reasons and resolve them faster and better, under the guidance of a good teacher.     

Distinctions between the Three Major Native Dialects of English

This paper focuses on essential distinctions between the major native dialects of English which are often divided by linguists into the three general categories of the British Isles dialects,those of North America and those of Australasia.English learners might want to learn a standard accent,because maybe they need it in a play or maybe they want to impress their friends,or maybe they want to fit in better in a certain English speaking environment.The paper hopes to help Chinese English learners firstly isolate the distinctions among different but widely-used and officially-accepted accents and then speak good English by means of eliminating incorrect accent by imitating Standard English pronunciation.     

On Negative Transfer in Pronunciation by English Majors in Higher Vo cational and Technical Colleges

In the reform of educational structure in China recently, vocational education is being focused and higher vocational education is developing rapidly. With the increase of student enrollment in Higher Vocational Technical College (HVTC), the quality of students is declining in the meantime and especially the students who major in English have a low proficiency in English language. This thesis explores the theory of phonetics and the theory of transfer in second language learning and deals with negative transfer of mother tongue in segmental and supra-segmental levels to HVTC students when they learn English pronunciation and intonation.     

The Differences of Pronunciation between American English and British English

This paper begins with a brief introduction to the two branches of the English language.Analyze the differences pronunciation between American English and British English,then demonstrates the reason why cause the different.Firstly,about four hundred years ago,people from Britain,German,France and many other parts of the world came into the U.S.They not only brought their rich cultures but also their languages too.Secondly,because of its territory expansion and economic development,American English become stronger.And then in different vowels and consonants analyze the differences of pronunciation between American English and British English,and set some examples.     

Research on the Mistakes Made by College English Teachers in Pronunciation of /n/&/l/

As an old saying goes that“once you open mouth, you are decided”. Thus, there is no doubt about the fact that English pronunciation is of great importance, especially for English teachers whose pronunciation exerts far-reaching and direct influences on that of students. Some of College English teachers, however, have poor pronunciation; most of them cannot distinguish/n/ from /l/. Therefore, it is of huge practical value to commit to the research on the mistakes made by College English teachers in pronunciation of /n/ &/l/ and analyze the underlying causes in the hope of helping teachers to improve their poor pronunciation.     

The Differences between British English and American English

British English and American English are two varieties of English. American English derived from British English and they have many similarities and differences. British English and American English are different in pronunciation, spelling, vocabulary and customary usage/syntax, etc.     

The Basic Value of Phonetics in College EFL Classroom

In college EFL learning, teachers have commonly attracted significant attention to improve 5 skills of listening, speaking, reading, writing and translating instead of pronouncing when students are taught EFL in the classroom. As a matter of fact,most students have serious trouble in pronunciation before entering college due to their enjoying involving in reading comprehension for English silently in their spare time. Teachers in college trust their students who have the ability to pronounce precisely any English so that they ignore seriously to enhance their basic value of the perfect and standard speech sounds. Teachers believe the acceptable pronunciation is the best way to learn foreign language. It gives a comprehensive opinion on phonetics during the process of learning EFL in college in order to potentially impede that teachers in college recognize its basic and important position so that they can help their students improve the ability of pronouncing to practice 5 advanced skills.     

On the Cultural Comparison between Chinese and English——The Analogy of Animal Words

Languages convey cultural information while they are used as tools to communicate.With the development of human society and the frequencies of intercultural communication,cultural differences may impact on people’s normal communications.Cultural differences between English and Chinese appear in many aspects of languages.Animal words are influenced by such cultural factors as geographical conditions,historical developments,traditional customs,mythology and fables,etc.So they are endowed with abundant cultural connotations.A similar animal word may have different connotative meanings in English and Chinese respectively,but sometimes different animal words have the same connotations.Whether they are different or not will reflect cultural differences between Chinese and English.Thus,through illustration,classification and comparison of English and Chinese animal words,the thesis aims to explore the cultural differences between English and Chinese.What’s more,the thesis aims to help English learns have a better understanding of English culture and develop the abilities of English language study.     

Approaches to College English Pronunciation Teaching

In most universities in China,pronunciation has long been overlooked in college English teaching.With the reform of college English teaching,great attention has been paid to the cultivation of the students’ listening and speaking skills,that is,Eng lish teaching has moved to language functions and communicative competencies,a new urgency for the teaching of pronuncia tion has arisen.This paper covers the four areas of pronunciation:sounds,stress,rhythm,and intonation,with the expectation that it will provide readers with comprehensive insight into ways of teaching pronunciation.     

The Situation of the Nowadays Pronunciation Teaching and Some Solutions

Pronunciation teaching is the foundation of learning English. But for now, phonetics teaching has been a weak point in English teaching, and there are many problems, for example, Phonetics teaching has not received full attention, British and American sounds crisscross, teaching material layout is not reasonable, etc. Aiming at these problems, we should find out the corresponding solutions timely to correct and perfect our pronunciation teaching.     

A Contrastive Study of Word Order in Chinese and English

The present paper attempts to make a contrastive study on Chinese and English word order with a view of identifying the discrepancies and propose its significance to mutual translation.As to the research methodology,qualitative analysis and com parative analysis are adopted when the similarities and differences of the word order of English and Chinese are explained.It can be concluded that Chinese and English word order differs at the phrase level and sentence level:in terms of the discrepancies in phrase structure,they are mainly manifested in adverbial and attributive phrases;as to the discrepancies in sentence structure,they are reflected in simple,complex and special sentences.     

Speaker adapted dynamic lexicons containing phonetic deviations of words

Speaker variability is an important source of speech variations which makes continuous speech recognition a difficult task. Adapting automatic speech recognition （ASR） models to the speaker variations is a well-known strategy to cope with the challenge, Almost all such techniques focus on developing adaptation solutions within the acoustic models of the ASR systems. Although variations of the acoustic features constitute an important portion of the inter-speaker variations, they do not cover variations at the phonetic level. Phonetic variations are known to form an important part of variations which are influenced by both micro-segmental and suprasegmental factors. Inter-speaker phonetic variations are influenced by the structure and anatomy of a speaker＇s articulatory system and also his/her speaking style which is driven by many speaker background characteristics such as accent, gender, age, socioeconomic and educational class. The effect of inter-speaker variations in the feature space may cause explicit phone recognition errors. These errors can be compensated later by having appropriate pronunciation variants for the lexicon entries which consider likely phone misclassifications besides pronunciation. In this paper, we introduce speaker adaptive dynamic pronunciation models, which generate different lexicons for various speaker clusters and different ranges of speech rate. The models are hybrids of speaker adapted contextual rules and dynamic generalized decision trees, which take into account word phonological structures, rate of speech, unigram probabilities and stress to generate pronunciation variants of words. Employing the set of speaker adapted dynamic lexicons in a Farsi （Persian） continuous speech recognition task results in word error rate reductions of as much as 10.1% in a speaker-dependent scenario and 7.4% in a speaker-independent scenario.     

Some main effective reading strategies

Reading becomes more and more important in English learning in recent days.If we want to read efficiently,there are a lot of strategies for us to use when read.We can make predictions before reading a passage.When we read,we can read in a sense group.If we do not know the word when we read,we can guess the meaning of the word through the roots,the prefixes,the suffixes.In a word,having lots of practice with suitable reading strategies can enable us to improve our English reading skills.     

How Should Oral Skills be Taught in the English Language Classroom

There is general agreement today that the communicative approach to the teaching and learning of English is the correct one and that we learn English for the purpose of communicating with other English-speakers. However, this is a comparatively recent development. This paper begins with an historical overview outlining the origins of the communicative approach in Europe and the United States and noting that they arrived at a consensus for entirely different historical reasons. In China English replaced Russian as the most important foreign language a generation ago but even then the emphasis was on receptive skills. The thorny question of authenticity is then discussed. While everyone agrees that in theory authenticity is a key consideration there is considerably less agreement on how to convert theory into practice. Finally the paper goes on to note how recent practice has abandoned the teacher-centered approach in favor of the learner-centered approach and the exercise-based approach in favor of the task-based approach, The task-based approach emphasizes integrated as opposed to individual skills acquisition. Examples of integrated tasks are given in the Appendix.     

Retrospective and New Initiatives for 2013

In 2010,Frontiers of Education in China underwent a complete change of direction.From publishing Chinese academic papers that had been translated into English,the journal shifted to publishing original papers,which have not appeared in print anywhere before.This important reorientation allowed us to develop a close contact with scholars studying Chinese education around the world,and to publish their insights into Chinese education in a timely manner.Prior to publication,every paper goes through a rigorous peer review process and the subsequent decisions are made with adequate communication and discussion.In working with scholars who are knowledgeable about Chinese education,including our authors,readers,and reviewers,we have developed a solid professional relationship and a valuable friendship,for which we always feel grateful.Owing to their suggestions,we have been able to introduce various initiatives for the purpose of bettering this journal.     

Exploration and Practice of Improving College Students’ Speaking Competence through Group Discussion

The aim of English teaching is not only to make the students learn new words and grammar, answer multiple-choice questions to get good scores, but also to enhance the students’abilities of the integrated application of English, speaking and listening in particular. The ultimate goal of learning English is to use English to communicate with others in the future jobs and real life. However, the non-English majors have great trouble speaking English in class and in real life. Such ways as Socratic dialogues, cause analysis and questionnaire are used to investigate the reasons. In order to improve speaking ability, group discussion is used in class. In consequence, the students have more interest, motivation, courage and confidence in speaking English. Meanwhile, they have also established the concept of using what they learned in class, in practical work and real life.     

Brief Survey of the Communicative Approach and the Strategy of Improving the Students’ Communicative Competence

With the rapid development of economy and improvement position of English as an international language in our country,English teaching draw a lot of attention nowadays.In traditional English teaching,it's the teachers who manipulate everything in class,where students are seen as receivers of knowledge.Therefore,it lacks cooperation between teachers and students.Students have no opportunity to apply what they have learnt in class to practical communications.In this teachers-centered class,students are not able to bring themselves into full play,which explains the low quality of English teaching in some schools and students fail to communicate with others after many years' learning.Based on the theory of Communicative Approach,the paper analyses its advantages and existing problems in application and proposes some strategy of improving students'Communicative Competence.